360: If You Ever Caught A Fighter Pilot In A Defensive Mood, You'd Have Him Licked Before You Started Shooting. With Navy Fighter Pilot Tom Kopel

This is Jocko podcast number 360 with Dave Burke and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Dave.

Good evening.

The Secretary of the Navy takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Commendation Medal to Lieutenant Thomas Coppel for services set forth in the following citation for heroic achievement as a pilot of jet aircraft while attached TO Fighter Squadron 142 embarked in USS Constellation on 14 January 1970. Lieutenant Coppell flew the wing aircraft of a two plane attack mission in Southeast Asia. Despite heavy anti aircraft fire in the area, he placed all of his bombs on target resulting in five enemy trucks destroyed and many secondary explosions and many enemy casualties. His professional determination in spite of heavy anti aircraft fire and adverse weather conditions resulted in a substantial damage to the enemy's logistics efforts. Lieutenant Coppell's superb airmanship, courage and devotion to duty reflected great credit upon himself and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval service. The combat distinguishing device is authorized for the Secretary MF Wisner Vice Admiral, United States Navy.

And that is a citation.

That represents the types of missions that were flown by Navy fighters day after day, night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year. Those were the type of missions that resulted in.

Solid battle damage to the enemy, but also resulted in 532 aircraft lost in combat. 401 aviators killed, 64 missing, 179 captured who became prisoners of war.

75 of those aircraft that were shot down were F4 Phantoms.

These missions were flown by pilots who took incredible risks to get the job done and eventually pilots that rewrote the book on air to air combat and laid the foundation for how fighter pilots are trained to this very day. And it's an honor to have one of these pilots here with us tonight. That pilot in fact is from the opening award citation, Tom Copel. Tom, thanks for coming down. Appreciate you coming out here. Anyone know?

We got Dave, he, he used to keep me honest. Well, he's always done that.

He's always excited. The few times I've had some pilots on without having Dave on.

Right.

He's not happy about it. So we got him here and I guess let's, let's just kind of start from the beginning and how you grew up and where you came from. So you were, you were born in, in Queens, is that right?

Yeah, Jamaica Hospital, huge hospital in Queens. But we lived just over the city line in a new development. That house was built and my parents moved in with a brand new baby.

And, and this was 19 what, 41 so you're pre war?

Yeah, and my dad was not drafted because of me.

He was an insurance underwriter. Financial district of insurance district of downtown, Downtown Manhattan, Nassau street and those places down there. And a nice guy, I have to say.

Well, that's good. How much you know. So you're born in 1941, I'm assuming before the war started. Before Pearl Harbor?

I was, yeah, August and Pearl harbor was in December.

Do you.

So as you're growing up, is there any part of World War II that you remember?

I remember my mother telling me that the war in Japan was over. I don't remember her telling me the war in Europe was over.

On the other hand, since I was 4 years old and had a brand new sister, they sort of left me alone. And I would go down to the corner, believe it or not, on what was then, I guess it probably still is Hillside Avenue. And I used to see lowboy trucks with Grumman.

I assume they were F6 fighters with the wings removed. They put the fuselage and the wings on the side. I think the engines and the propellers were on them. But obviously they were on their way to South Pacific. And you asked your mother what the heck is that? And she said, oh, they're going to war and stuff like that.

I assume that was 1944. I was three years old sitting on the curb. And that's the first I remember any of that. But they told me that both Grumman and Republic were out in the island at that time. I guess it was Little Farms.

Did that leave an impression on you? Seeing the fighters? I mean? First of all, I don't remember anything until I was about 17, I think. So you remembering stuff at 3 is pretty impressive.

But did you think, oh, these are war planes going to war. Did that make any sense to you?

Oh yes. Oh yes. But I never expected that I would be a guy who would fly them or anything like that. The other thing I remember about flying machines was not combat or anymore war or anything like that was the fact that Idlewild that became JFK when they expanded it was. And the airport was seeing the DC7Bs coming in from Europe in bad weather. They used the east west Runway and streaming fire out of the back of the off the top of the wings. I thought how the heck is that? So I finally, in my grown up days talked to a guy who's a retired naval aviator. P3s he's semi. I said, dennis, why didn't you want to be a carrier guy? Many engines, Tom. Oh, sorry about that. But at any rate, he was a flight engineer on DC7BS. And he said that's because a flight engineer goes full rich and flames roaring out the back. And especially in foggy weather when they're.

Oh, so that's what you'd be seeing.

Yeah, I wanted to do that. That's really hot stuff. But. And, well, and jumping ahead, I guess. But why did I want to go with. I wanted to. My father said I graduated from college. My dad said, what are you going to do? And I said, I don't know. He said, why don't you see if one of the services will teach you how to fly? I said, don't take guys like me. He said, they sure do.

Well, before you get to college. What was growing up like? Did you grow up there just outside the city?

Yeah, and I was just a kid.

A four year old kid down on the corner of Hillside Avenue. By yourself. Which is cool.

Yeah, but that was different time, I think, or something. Like maybe there were as many monsters around then as there are now, but nobody talked about or acted that way. And as soon as I got a bike, you know, then it was really on. Yeah, I was never there.

Were you. How'd you do in school? Did you like school?

Terrible. I hated school.

I hated school. I was a. My wife loves to tease me that I was such a terrible little monster. That one of the classrooms that I was in in grade school had a. It was at the two classrooms at the end of the hallway and then a connecting room between the two. She put me in the connecting room with a door that opened so I could see the blackboard. But I was in the room with the door open about 10 inches wide.

Were you just a hyperactive kid?

I think so. And bored with all of that? I could read before I could read when I was 4, so they were always buying me books, so stuff like that.

So you were smart but bored?

I guess. I don't know.

What about sports? Were you into sports at all?

Yeah, because I was the biggest kid and.

Touched football in high school, which got. I'm sorry. In grade school, seventh and eighth grade and it gets a little rough. At least it did then, so. But I never got hurt or anything like that. And then when I got to high school, I played, played football and played first team.

What year did you graduate high school?

59.

So you grew up in like the iconic 50s?

That's right.

When you see those movies or you just.

I think it's awful.

Why is it awful?

The clothes that they wear and the Nostalgia. The car. Cars I do today are death traps. But they bring huge money. These cars in the 50s.

Which one did you have? You must have had one. Did you have one? I guess. Maybe not in the city.

No, it's not the city. It was real suburbs, wooden houses on.

Little bitty lots.

So did you have a car?

No. You know what? I never owned a car until I was in flying school in Big Spring, Texas. Never had a need of one. Got around back in the 50s, early 60s. You stick out your thumb, you gotta ride. People were different then. Somehow or other. I don't really understand how that is, but I went all over the eastern half of the United States with my phone. I went everywhere and never worried about getting back or anything like that. But one time, the worst time I ever had doing that was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Western Pennsylvania. I was there for 12 hours.

What?

No one would pick me up. I have no idea why. Maybe I'd look scowly or something. I don't know.

I don't think I would have been a great hitchhiker. If it comes down to look at, we definitely have some issues. So you're growing up in the iconic 50s. How do those movies miss the mark? Hit the mark? I mean, how are they?

The 50s movies? Yeah. I don't know. I don't. I frankly, I don't remember.

I don't remember what movies you might be talking about.

What about Elvis?

Thought it was awful.

You thought Elvis was awful?

I personally did. I guess my sisters thought otherwise. I had three younger sisters, but I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard of. So that's what I thought.

So what were you listening to?

I have to admit classical music.

Minor story. My wife. When, before we were married.

Somehow or other I introduced her to the fact that I listened mostly to classical music. And she went home. She tells me now, actually, after we were married, said, this guy is a little bit weird.

Suspect for sure.

This is the classical music.

I don't know. Rimsky, Korsakoff, Scheherazade, that everybody knows. I was really intrigued by that. So I listened to classical music and still do today, Whatever.

So the rock and roll thing was not your scene?

Not until the California. The British invasion in California. And that was altogether different.

Okay, we'll get there. So you graduate from High School 1959. So you lived through the Korean War as well?

I remember it well. I remember being in Boy Scout camp when they announced the armistice had just been signed that morning, or whenever it was. That was a big deal. Everybody cheered.

But you still didn't get the impression that that was something that you might do one day?

No, no, there was no military tradition in the family at all except for.

A grand uncle, maximum nice guy who was a graduate of the same college as Donald Trump graduated, still exists in New York State Military Academy, I think it's called. But he graduated in 1936 or something like that. And he was part of the last combat cavalry regiment in the United States army and it was disbanded I think in 1939 as the Storm clouds were gathering. And they disbanded that unit. But that was officers with real swords and two horses each and all the rest of everything else about that, but that was a combat unit, not a display unit. It was the last one. He wound up in Iceland for the duration of the war, deriding the whole experience. But I only realize in my grown up days that if Hitler had won the battle of Britain, Iceland was next. And they probably no doubt knew that, but they all. I went to a reunion with him at one point and they all derided their experience there and so forth, but they would have been the first to be killed in the first super German raid, no doubt on Iceland to flatten the place.

Yeah, we used to get a similar thing in the seal teams where you'd get some platoons would be going over to Iraq or Afghanistan and some other platoons would be going to like Guam or some somewhere there's no war going on. And of course all the guys that are get sent to Guam are just angry that they can't be in Iraq or Afghanistan. And meanwhile the guys in Iraq or Afghanistan are freezing or sweating to death or they're getting shot at or whatever.

Yeah, they use real bullets, bullets here and stuff like that.

But that's what, you know, that's what people join the seal teams for. And apparently the horse cavalry as well.

Yeah, it was for real swords and the whole deal with those guys. And he was a wonderful man, wonderful man. When sisters were born, I got farmed out with him twice in the summertime and.

He worked and Lower New York State, Binghamton and Elmira, those places around there. And he had grand aunts who had a truncated farm there and he farmed me out with them. You're just slave labor for the summer. I had kid fun being a kid with cornfields and ponds and stuff like that all over the place there.

And then. Where'd you end up. So where'd you end up going to college?

I went to Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania.

A commuter for me. Very small college at that time. 850 students at that time. And now it's about 12 or 1300. Maybe a little bit more than that. But wonderful teachers there. Absolutely wonderful. Especially the men. But one notable woman who was a pacifist of all things. But she was absolutely a wonderful woman.

How come she left such a big impression on you?

Because she was so straight. I'd never met a woman quite like that. She was straightforward and thoughtful and aggressive. I like a woman who is. My wife.

Tells you what's on her mind immediately. And she was that way. I guess.

And she was a professor there?

Yeah. She was.

What was she teaching?

English. English and speech. And you got to be. She changed you with her professional abilities and so forth. And I remember sitting there arguing with her silently. No.

A ten minute lecture about using the atomic bomb. Bomb in Japan. She was opposed to that. And.

I don't think she had read notably or widely enough about all that. And I had at that point and as opposed to that. But still I thought she was really great.

Point of view sort of thing.

What were you studying?

I was.

Econ major. Not business economics and minor in history.

And had some fabulous teachers there. A guy named Wilbur Gingrich who was a.

Genuinely world famous Greek scholar and biblical scholar.

A couple of other guys that nobody ever heard of. But wonderful man And.

A crazy guy who loved to teach European and Russian history. Took him for Russian. Don't take him. For God's sakes. You've got a D out of that. And he'll blither you and you can't write fast enough. And his class kicked. His name was.

Gingrich. Was the. The biblical scholar and Greek scholar.

Can you believe his name? Escapes me. But at any rate Kistler. And they said you'll get a D out of his class because you can't write fast enough and stuff like that. But he was something. He smoked continuously.

And always had the window open. And the butts went out the window and he'd torch up another one. But he was really something.

What'd you get in the class?

B? All of six in the class.

So at some point you got more into school than you were when you were in grammar school or whatever.

Yeah. No, because it had smart people. Smarter than I was and.

How'D you put it? My parents weren't really educated if you will. My mother had had a college degree from nyu. But I think she skated as much as she could. And my dad. They kicked him out of grade school. Yeah. Out of school when he was after 10th grade, I think, because he was done. They did that at that time in the 20s. So both of them wanted me to be educated and so forth. So it was interesting to be in the company of genuinely educated people. And I didn't catch fire at first. By the time I was a junior, I understood that this is really an experience. You can get.

Interesting things out of these people. By the time I was a senior, I didn't want to leave because you get to talk as a grown up with these grownups who listen to you and then tell you things you had never conceived of before, before and stuff like that. So I had a good time in college until they kicked me out.

At what point did you start looking at the military as a legitimate option for you?

Not until I was about to graduate. And back in the good old days, my dad worked. He was a New Yorker. New Yorker. New Yorker. But he got a job in Reading, Pennsylvania. And it was a shock to all of us. I didn't want to leave the school I was in. I was going to produce.

So this is back in high school?

Yeah. I was two years into Chaminade High School on Long island, which is by entrance exams and tuition. And I liked it there. I was doing a little bit better, a little bit better, but I didn't want to leave. And he came home and said he'd been offered a job and Reading, Pennsylvania. Where is that?

We were New Yorkers. New Yorkers. I can do the accent, too. And of course, when you get to Pennsylvania, the kids make endless fun of you because of your accent and stuff. But at any rate, where was I in this?

We're just trying to figure out, at.

What point did you think the military.

Might be an option?

I could go downtown Redding and go up the fire tower staircase and plop in a chair in my dad's office. And he said, so, what are you going to do? You're going to graduate here? And I said, I don't know. He said.

Have you considered maybe the government would teach you how to fly in one of the services? They don't take guys like me. He said, they surely do. 2000s and.

Good shape. Nothing wrong with him. So I applied to the Navy guy, and he.

Was an embarrassment. Overweight, feet up on the desk.

Didn't seem to care about anything. I filled out all his paperwork and he never got back to me. Went to the Air Force guy, and he was close to his quota, probably.

He drove me around to. You have to go here and fill out these. I'll Help you fill out the form. So I did that, and the Air Force took me. So. But the.

What was the question?

Well, that was the question. The question was, how did you first get.

So my dad said, see if you can learn how to fly. And he didn't know how to fly.

So did they have, like, a contract that made you a pilot? Was that part of the. The enlistment process?

When they said, we like everything you do now, you have to fill out a.

Preference sheet, and you can put whatever you like in there. We suggest this list of stuff over here, and then you make them 1, 2, and 3 choices. I said, well, I want to be a pilot because that's what I'm doing this whole thing for. He said, well, most people put in navigator for second, and then something like, I don't know, auxiliary aviation or something like that. Well, that's not why I'm here. So I put pilot. Pilot, pilot. One, two, three. Funny thing, too. The B52 squadron I was later in was a guy from my college class. And I said, danny, what are you doing here as a navigator? He said, well, they told me, put pilot first, navigator second. I said, you don't wear glasses or anything. He said, well, that's what they took me as. I said, well, I didn't want to rub it in, so I just let it alone.

So what was your indoctrination to the Air Force then?

I went to their OCS in.

San Antonio. It's not at Lackland. It's. I think they call it the Medina base. It's nearby. And went through that. That's three months.

Was it a shock to your system? Were you wondering why the hell you did this?

Well, I was fortunate. There were several.

Previous enlisted guys there, and I thought, they know the ropes, do whatever they do. So that's what I did. And then they said, if you play a musical instrument, put your name on this list. And I said, guy told me, don't volunteer for anything before I went in. So I found out that the guy was running this thing. He loves to have live music for any parades that he has. And if you can play a musical, get your name on. I did.

What instrument did you play?

I played the trumpet and cornet. I can play baritone. I can play alto horn or French horn or any of those. But I dropped that for a long time. Midlife. I'm back into it now. Anyway, you got out of everything. You straightened up your digs and your bed and whatnot.

When the Saturday morning inspection happened, we had rehearsal. That was. They if you will. All knew that.

So this is 19. What? 1963.

No, no, 65. January 65. Because, see, I graduated. I graduated in August because I was having too much fun by that point in college, I found you ought to take that professor's history course. He's really interesting. And you should take Comparative Economic Systems because you should do that. And I didn't have enough credits. I had two. If you needed 150, I had 175. But you don't have enough in your major or in your minor. You took that course and you got a good grade at any rate. So I wound up graduating in August. But how to get into that?

So it's 1965. So you're starting to hear about Vietnam. You guys must be talking about Vietnam.

No, because that happened in January of.

65. In summer of 64. I worked through college at a small summer stock playhouse because I was in the drama club in college. And you meet the this guy and meet that guy and so forth, and all very legitimate, if you will, good people. Not these sorts of flaky, dumb people that you might think of when you think of theater sort of people. And I had a mentor by this point, a guy from New York who was old enough to be my father. And he said, when you graduate, what are you going to do? I said, well, well, I don't know. I have this paperwork in to go to the Air Force to fly and stuff. And he said they were looking for a guy like you at a theater in Baltimore that I am going to. He said, should I mention you to them? Well, okay. So he called me in about a week or so, and he said, they want 15 minutes of drama and 15 minutes of comedy. If you can do that, they want to talk to you. So I went to a woman in the summer stock company, Grace Chapman, wonderful woman. And I said, can you help me? And she did. I said, oh, I'm going to do it like this. And she, no, no, no, we're going to do it this way and so forth. So rehearsed it with her. Have to memorize everything, of course, did all that and went down to Baltimore, stood up on the stage lights, and.

They got what a few people are watching you to judge you.

The two bosses sitting in the seats.

And they're thinking of giving you some kind of a role or.

No, they had a program there where you actually worked, as it were, in the union deal. The actors union is called Actors Equity. You work as a local jobber and.

It'S cold doing what what's your job as a cold.

When they've got you, they've got you by the short hairs, as they say. And.

You will get roles, maybe minor, maybe just a walk on for this one and maybe something serious. I got one very nice role out of it. I was the elder son in Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, notable European communist.

But a good director there for that. John Marley, the guy who a lot of people, he was a workhorse.

Hollywood movie actor. He was the guy in bed with a horse during the. The first Godfather film. That was John Marley. And a nice man as well.

Anyway, so wait, so this was in the summertime.

You were doing this summer stock in a barn, believe it or not, in Pennsylvania. And then Jerry Richards was a New York guy, old enough to be. My dad said he was going to this equity company in Baltimore, relatively new, called Center Stage. It's still active today. And was I interested? Did you have another thing in mind? And I went back and I said to my mother in passing, I was thinking about this. She said, do what you have to do. All right. So.

I hitchhiked once again to Baltimore. To Baltimore.

And how long did you stay in Baltimore for?

Only until I got a big fat envelope in the mail from dod.

And it said, we will teach you to fly if you want to. And of course, the draft was there, and I had already called the draft board, and I said, where am I? And they said, we can't tell you by the law, but I'll tell you this, you're close to the front of the drawer. I remember that very well. And I thought, I got to do something about this. I wonder what to do about this. And I went to a fellow guy who was in the same position I was in the company, and I said, I don't know what to do. And he said, do what I did. Tell them you like boys, not girls. I said, that's not true. He said, it's not true with me either, but it got me right. They go, go sit on the bench over there. And they ask you, do you really like boys rather than girls? And he said. I just said, that's right, I do. And that was the end of that. And I got off. I thought, oh, boy, that may be good advice some ways. But I thought, somewhere down the road, somebody's going to drag that out 40 years from now. And so I didn't want to do that. And lo and behold, I get this big fat envelope in the mail. I go to Jerry Richards, my mentor. I said, what should I Do. He said he was a combat veteran of World War II. Dog faced soldier, had funny stories to tell about being on a line of march. Hot, sweaty and Italian farmer going by with a wooden tank on a little wagon pulled by a horse. And the second lieutenant or whoever he was said, stay away from that tank. We all knew it was full of wine or grape juice anyway. And he said we got two thirds of the line through there and somebody went boom, boom, boom. And that was it. Everything collapsed. Anyway, super nice guy and whatnot. I went to Jerry and I said, what should I do about this? And he said, well, you always come back to this, but you never get another chance to do that. So I signed on the dotted line and I went into the air force like the 2nd of January 1975.

1965.

That'S right, 65.

So. So yeah, so that early part of Vietnam, because I always think in the way the news kind of worked. It was the battle, the I drang Valley in 1965 where really hit the news and there was casualties and it seemed like the escalation really kind of started. Yeah.

So you get done with the. The Officer Candidate School and then is it you get your slot to flight school.

Right. And that was at Webb Air Force Base in West Texas at Big Spring, Texas.

Pretty much of a barren place just east of the big big oil fields. But there were plenty of oil wells around where I was around Big Spring. But the big oil fields around Midland and.

Odessa, Texas, Permian Basin it's called.

There had been at least one crash at Big Spring, Texas. They made a very big deal out of it, and rightly so. The guy was confused about stars and oil fields. Every drilling, not their drilling rig, but every pumping deal has its own light bulb on it. And he got confused and rolled over. To your shame. Yeah, so really a shame. But I learned to fly there and then went to the.

And how was flight school?

It was tough for me at first because I didn't know a wing from a tail, an aileron from an elevator, anything. And about half those guys had private licenses, at least half of them had private licenses.

And a couple of them had commercial multi engines. They were just walking through the thing. But I was slow to get going. But when I got into the second half, which was the T38 at that time, I did very well.

It's like baseball trying. Baseball player trying to bring his average up second half of the season. So your grade point average was a problem for me. And I wound up getting a B52 assignment my roommates got C130s, which was a very desirable deal if you didn't want to get shot at. Turned out to be very foolish.

Because you and C130, you got shot at in the Vietnam War. And one of my roommates got air Defense Command, F104, which was considered to be creme de la creme until I got assigned to the F4.

But first you had to do your B52 time, right?

The G model in Rome, New York was a wonderful place. Wonderful people there. I liked everything about it except sitting alert. Awful.

So this is now, what, 1966 or so?

Yeah, that's right.

And you're assigned to the B52 squadron in Rome, New York.

Yeah. Very heavily decorated squadron from World War II. I can't even remember the number. 488 or something like that. 8th Air Force.

I had. The first guy they put me with was a.

Guy of shorter stature, and I think he had a problem about that. And I was six feet tall and whatnot. And all the way down to him saying. I said to him, that's not so. He said, it is so. And you shut up, because I'm a major and you're just a goddamn first lieutenant. Whoa. Okay. But at any rate, he fired me, so to speak. Basically, he didn't want to fly with me, me anymore, because I was. I may have made better landings than he did because the next guy I got was a family man and we got along like brothers, and it was great.

So the one lead pilot, or whatever is he called the lead pilot, the major.

Yeah.

He didn't like flying with you, Right? Well, he didn't like your attitude or.

Something, and he didn't like my attitude either.

So he got rid of you.

Right.

But then you just moved to another guy.

Yeah, well, they gave me another guy. You don't have any choice about it. But we got along, had fun every day.

And what's the deal with sitting alert?

Well, they did it two different ways. At Rome, New York, where I was, they had eight airplanes on alert at any one time.

All the airplanes that I was on had two Hound dogs stand off one missiles with thermonuclear weapons in them. The Mark 28 at that time, I don't think it's classified anymore, but the highest yield on those single warhead per. And there was a pop on there.

And then four thermonuclear weapons in the bomb bay and the. And four Quail decoy missiles in the bomb bay.

The targets for the ones I was On. Well, I was on a mission that was downtown Moscow, believe it or not, and land in Turkey. I think all of the ones I was on were land in Turkey because you were out of fuel by then. You refueled south of Iceland.

And then went in and then turned straight south and landed pretty much on an abandoned airfield in central Turkey. And you were instructed to get fuel by jerry can. This is silly and we knew it.

Jerry can was not enough. He had eight J57s in it.

And H model had modified J57s that were fan jet engines. Silly. You'd never get enough fuel to refuel the thing to fly it anywhere.

So I mean, was that just because once you flew over Moscow and dropped nuclear weapons, it wouldn't really matter where you were getting what was the.

Pretty much. Because you were assuming that the world would be a conflagration and the would be pretty much of a mess at that point. You would truly. A thermonuclear war would have finished by that time, I guess, and everything would be. Would be an awful, awful mess.

And are you sitting like. Are the weapons loaded on the aircraft? Just sitting there?

Staged absolutely positively with an armed guard on every airplane, walking around underneath every airplane 24 hours a day.

Was there any events that would heighten your readiness?

They would have practice alerts that could happen at any time. The.

SAC Strategic Air Command worldwide would call an alert in every SAC base on the planet, even in obscure places, would.

Do what they were told to do. And they basically had three commands. One, to man the airplanes and start them, stay in place. Second, start the airplanes and taxi down the Runway. Just motivate the flying machines. And third would be a real launch. Actually there were two kinds of launches launched to a holding point short of total commitment or four total commitment from minute one. So.

Obviously third and fourth never happened with me they would.

The alert was at Rome, New York, at Griffis Air Force Base is where I was. And wonderful people there too was seven days. You had seven days on. And the rules were half your time on alert you had free. But it didn't really work out that way because you didn't get away from the base until in this case, Thursday, 12 o' clock or something like that. And you lost half the day. And then they would schedule you for a flight maybe Monday night at 8pm so Monday was sort of gone because you had to sleep because you were going to fly for 12 hours. You took off at 8pm you were going to land at 8 o' clock Tuesday morning. All those missions, those training missions were eight hours.

But training missions were sort of fun and interesting. I spent a lot of time with my hands in my lap, but nevertheless, they were interesting. And you went all over the United States. All over the United States doing those things. And a lot of them were at low level because that's what you would do in the case of a nuclear war.

Oh, it's a low level attack.

Oh, yes. The B52s were all.

Assigned low altitude.

Like how low?

200Ft.

That's underneath radar, right?

Yeah, as low as you want to go is what I was told.

I said, this is a poker deck route and it's published at 400ft. How low are we talking about here if we have actually done have a war? As long as you want to go. I said one point that you have charts that were accurate. Accurate and highly classified, obviously. But I said to one of the guys who worked in the vault, you had to do target study while you were on alert. And I said, you show telephone poles here. Here I am the co pilot looking for the next turn. Can I count those telephone poles? Yes, you can. Whoa. They were all done by U2 or by satellite. I think the satellites were just starting at that time. So I said, so it would be the 28th telephone pole. I can turn left to 030. Yep. Anyway, so you. What was the question? Where the heck were we?

Well, it just. It's very interesting to hear like, sort of what your status was.

Yeah.

As a pilot and I. I actually asked you what level of alert? What's the highest level of alert you are. Because obviously you missed the Cuban Missile crisis.

That's right.

Because I'm sure that would have been a very high alert. Maybe they even. Do you think they got airborne for that?

I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't remember ever asking anybody. I don't. But I don't think that that happened. No.

And that had to be a little bit of a strange.

Weight on your shoulders to think about, especially with your background, with your English teacher that didn't like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

Right.

And here you are with a mission tasking that if you get this mission, you're going to fly and annihilate, you know, basically the world.

Well, I have a little bit of a funny story about exactly what's here.

How that turns into a funny story. I like that in the G and.

The H, we had the gunner up front and the guns that were in the tail.

So these are The G and H models of the B52 right up to that.

The gun erode in the tail. And if he were to bail out, he would jettison his turret, which weighed something like £2,000. Everything, his ammunition and his.50 calibers and everything short of his seat. He sat on a chemical toilet back there, incidentally. Then he would bail out. He did not have an ejection seat. It was right in front of his toes. And he just stepped forward or leaned forward and out he went with a conventional parachute. Anyway.

The gunner and the G and the H models up front and the cockpit arrangement is different in the G and the H than it was in the earlier up to The F model B52, the GS no longer exist. They went with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. The G's got pictures of them getting their wings cut off that they took airborne pictures of all that. So.

Comply with the Russians. Yeah. But at any rate, G and the H internally are the same. And they have the ECM officer and the gunner ride facing backwards and.

Oh, yeah. So on your charts, when you do your first day of alert target study, it's the same charts every time. Gunners, he's sitting across the table. I said, oh, you have Lpbn, that means something. And.

E3.5. That means something across the route of flight. And I said, lpbo.

In the same lettering, stencil, same ink, same everything. I said, what's lpbo? He said, last point of bailout.

I said, that's over Finland. He said, exactly right. I'm not going to anybody's nuclear war. I'm leaving over Finland. I'm taking the seat pack with me with the.22 rifle, the sleeping bag and everything, I'm out of here.

But it never happened. He was an E6 enlisted guy and nice family man and everything else, but he said, I'm not going to nuclear war. You nuts?

So how long did you do this job for?

A year. Well, including the rag, if you will, in Merced, California, a year and a half. But then I got the big fat envelope that said, here is your interservice transfer. If you want to do this, you can do this.

And that's what you had applied for, Right. And why did you try and do an inner service transfer to the Navy?

Because I didn't want two sides to that. There's popping your peas again there. I didn't want to sit alert anymore. I didn't like riding around with my hands in my lap.

And going way back. I had this idea in the back of my head My first cross country in the T37 out of Webb Air Force Base. We stopped somewhere, I can't remember, and there were two Navy guys there wearing golf shirts underneath their flight suits. And through the open door, there were two A4s parked out there. And they said something like USS Independence or USS who knows, Forestall, or who knows what? I thought, isn't that hot stuff? These guys can go to sea with those things and go, I don't know, anywhere they want that's hot. And then I saw the back of a Proceedings magazine. Proceedings used to be magazine size, then it became smaller format. But it showed an A4 looking over the A4 shoulder like the wingman or something like that looking over and he's on short final for a carrier. And I thought, that's hot shit.

So that did it. And was it hard to put in that interservice transfer? Was it pretty straightforward?

Well, they bounced it back at me, said, oh, no, format's wrong. Has to be this way and that way and have to do that. And I said, fine. Well, what do you want us to do? I said, well, you tell me it's wrong. I did it according to what was in the publication's library. You do it. I said, well, I guess we have to. And they did. Then I signed everything a second time, and then away it went.

And you got straight into the pilot pipeline.

Well, no, I was. You know, when you're a military officer, you are an officer of the United States. You're not an Air Force officer or a Navy officer or even an officer of the. There's a land survey and mapping service. They have military uniforms. You are an officer of the United States States. So it isn't like you change services. You change uniforms and you change terminology and you change verbiage.

And the name of your grade changes from first lieutenant to lieutenant junior grade. But.

They can put you anywhere they want. You can be a SEAL who is a lieutenant lieutenant commander, and they can say, guess what? We want you in the embassy in Tunisia. And it's only going to be six months, but you'll be wearing civilian clothes and you'll be responsible for thus and so and thus and so. And I can do that because remember, you're appointed by the President of the United States. You're going to serve in that capacity. So that's what happens with an interservice transfer. And I was told that. That when you make the transfer, it's basically a long table meeting of.

Senior service. I have a doc who wants to come over to the Air Force. And you have a junior lieutenant who wants to go Navy. I'll swap you for those two. Okay, that's fine. You do that and so forth and so forth and that's the way it's done. But every six months or something like that and it probably goes on right now, I don't know.

But you ended up with the pilot slot somehow.

Yeah, well, I had orders to Kingsville Corpus Christi and wound up standing in a guy's office, nice guy with Lieutenant Commander fuel with a parking ramp with S2s stoofs parked behind him. Piston engine anti submarine airplanes. It was a training facility for them and a couple of lieutenant commanders standing over here and me standing right here in front of his desk. And he said, what are we going to do with you? I said, I don't know, I just have these orders. He said, you flew jets? I said, yeah. He said, well, then we send you to Kingsville. What should we do with him? What happens if you can't get aboard? I thought, I will get aboard.

So what's Kingsville?

Kingsville. Two advanced training bases. I think is B ville, still active. Beeville's close. Still Kingsville, yeah. And Kingsville is bigger than ever. Navy advanced. At that time they were F9s there. And I went over to Kingsville and introduced myself and dropped my orders on the table and so to speak and all very nice and looked out the window and they had these ancient airplanes, F9s, Korean War vintage. Oh boy, what.

Ancient equipment. Here there was more fun to fly than you can imagine. You put the power up all the way and leave it there. And it's like your brother's MG with the little four cylinder engine in. It was so much fun to drive. Underpowered, same way fun, fun, fun to fly. It was truly a flying airplane.

With a wing, airfoil wing and everything else. You get into the Phantom and you find no, this is a machine, this is different.

Now at this point you're hearing about Vietnam. Vietnam's now it's 19 what? 1967.

Yeah.

So now you know what you're in a pipeline. Your goal is to be a fighter pilot. You know that that pipeline ends up in Vietnam.

Yeah. So your detailer calls you on the whole phone in the boq. And I was, I think I was a lieutenant by this point. Maybe not senior lieutenant junior grade. Anyway, two rooms and private bath. And you were in Kingsville in Those.

Big solid BOQs. Very nice and whatnot. But when you took a shower, the water was so bad the ground it smelled like ancient sauerkraut. Remember that? It was awful. At any rate.

Where were we?

So at what point do you get assigned to go to the rag for F4?

Well, your detailer calls you on the whole phone, of all things. And put Tom Coppel on. He's in room B7. The guy comes in, hey, Tommy, you got a phone call. It's my detailer again. He said, tom, we really want you in the A6. That's just for you. Same as the B52. You have experience with offsets and everything else. It's going to be perfect. I said, I don't want that, Bob. You know that. Call me back. Next.

Series of phone calls. The last one was the same thing. Tom, you Perfect for the A6. By now you probably looked around, talked around about it. That's a heck of an airplane. Yeah, I know, Bob. I still want to fly the F4. Okay, let me think about it. And about a week later, Guy called me up and said, you have orders up there at Admin. Big Spring at that. I'm sorry. Kingsville at that time was Nowhere Land, and I did not have a car. I said, it's up at the other end of the main drag that paralleled the hangar.

Area. Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. I said, well, first of all, I said, fred, what do my orders say? I wouldn't look at them. It's none of my business. Oh.

Gentlemen don't read each other's mail. I walk up there and here I had F4 to mirror arm and the F4.

What year did the F4 come out? What year was that?

I think the first prototype flew in 58. Is that right?

That sounds about right.

Just real quick.

All right, so you go through all Air Force training, you're a B52 guy, and then you CQ in the F9.

Yeah.

What was that like?

I mean, they were worried that you can't even get aboard, right?

Yeah. What was that like? Well, I guess my FCLP was okay. And when I first time out, fclp, I think this is Paul Army. I can do this. And so forth. And the guy comes back and he says, well, you were this, and you were this, and you were. That's amazing. How do you know that? And so forth. And that's LSOs, they grade you accurately. And their club Dave knows this.

I was in lso.

It's hard to get into their club, and you can't really dispute what they tell you. And after every SC landing, he's in your ready room saying, well, you started out high and, and so forth and so forth.

So you guys have now both thrown. I was wondering if I missed something. But the term get aboard, what does this mean? Expand on it.

There are guys, I guess, who just say, you crazy, I'm not going to do that. I thought, I didn't realize you had to do that. Or I guess that's what happens. Or they're just what used to be called. The guy's a plumber and he can't do it.

So get aboard means you actually qualify in the aircraft. Yeah.

Get aboard is just a language for can you land on the ship.

Right.

And got it. Okay, that's missing. I didn't. That's what I was missing. Yeah.

And it's hard. It's the phrase of, hey, is this guy gonna be able to get aboard? Meaning can he land his plane on the boat? What happens, I think every now and then is you got guys go through the whole pipeline. Carry calls is the last thing you do in training traditionally. And you could be great at all these things. But if you can't get aboard, you're no good to the Navy because we land on boats and so we send.

You to P3s or Elite.

Yeah, and fighters. Exactly.

So so is that what happens? You get sent to P3s, you get.

I mean now you get sent to, you know, P3s, you go to helicopters. If you can't get aboard in a jet, they're going to send you to some other non tactical platform. That's true.

I've been talking about this lately. It seems like there's certain skill sets of people some people just can't get through. Like, like for instance, when I was going through SEAL training.

I would say about one out of every hundred guys, they're, they're just, they're just not going to be able to shoot a pistol. Well, and they might actually not make it through the training because they can't shoot a pistol. They might be an athlete, they might be great at everything, they might be smart. They can't shoot a pistol. Close quarters combat, there's a bunch of strict little things that you have to follow. And some people, I think that number is about four out of every hundred. This is in basic SEAL training or SEAL qualification training that they're just not gonna get it. They're just, there's not bad people, they do a lot of other things well, but they just can't do that thing. And it sounds like occasionally someone that can fly a plane, someone that can land it on the airfield, someone that can do the turns they need to do in the sky, someone that understands the dynamics of it. But they can't get aboard, they can't land on that aircraft carrier and then it doesn't matter.

No, it does matter because.

You were a top gun guy. But I was an instructor at Meridian at the end of my career and I don't remember exactly how or what, but the guy said to me in the friendliest collegial way, if your students.

It'S not their fault, it's your fault. Because if this guy is not.

The sort of guy we want for Tailhook, we'll find a place for him and he'll be valuable to the Navy. And the Air Force is the other way around. It always felt to me like they were trying to get rid of you. They were always rotten to you. Except for one guy who wound up being a. I think I put this in my list of stuff. He wound up being a four star general in NATO in Europe.

Maybe it was personal.

Self esteem or self confidence or something like that. He was a very Quiet Instructor in T38s in Air Force advance, very laid back. He'd say, Tom, come left a little bit more or Tom, let me show you. And he did.

And he wouldn't talk to me for 10 minutes and stuff like that. But not because he didn't want to. He just let you go until you made him. No, no, no, let me show you something. And stuff like that. But at any rate, they always acted like they wanted to get ready in the Navy. If the kid doesn't make it, he's been qualified by us in 16 different ways. If he quits or.

Wants to quit, it's your fault, not his and so forth. We'll find a place for him and helos. And you have two guys there and stuff like that. So where the heck were we?

So, so then. So then you do get your orders. You get your F4 orders and I guess I kicked this whole tangent off just by the F4 at the time. Time was just like the ultimate beast.

The monster. Yeah, that's what I always called it. And then.

I went mirror. And I remember this like it was yesterday. Check in, do all that. Going to find a place in the boq. Forget it. I said, no chance, Tom. So I had to go find a place to live off base and. But at any rate, VF121 was the F4 rag at that time and was the eastward end of the Runway there. And I had a couple of steps going through a narrow gate that was always Open and an F4.

You'Re looking at the tail up the pipes of this thing. And I thought, oh, my God, I forgot. This is a monster. And they had Marines working on them because they were going to Da Nang or Chu Lai to get shot full of holes and eventually abandoned over there. And they took the radars out and put lead noses in them at that place and basically went over the whole thing. And they had Marines Mechs working on them there. But I thought, oh, my God, look.

That'S the thing. And then I walked to the end of the hangar and.

There were two F4s taking the Runway. And VF121 at that time was at that end of the east end of the Runway. And 99% of the time in Miramar took off to the west, and two F4s rolled out on the Runway. It was night and early morning, low coastal clouds and fog, just like here. This is at Miramar. And.

They ran up and then they rolled and they firewalled and they went to burner, and then they disappeared into the mist. I thought, oh, my God, I am in over my head.

But you learn to do it and get good at it. I got pretty good at it. Although, you know, there's a thing about LSOs, since you're here.

So the LSO is the grader, basically.

That'S the landing signal officer. You grade every landing.

That's right. Okay.

And you have to call Meatball and State for every landing, VFR or IFR or anything else. And he's the guy when you look up and they say, 12 peak is worth 10,000 scans scanning your panel. Instrument flying is something that's hard to understand. If you haven't done it, you cannot make a mistake or you're going to be killed and wreck the airplane. No mistakes allowed in genuine IFR and especially carrier ifr. But he's the guy who says to you, you say, 2400, Clara, and he says to you, that means I don't see the Meatball. And really, you can't see the deck either. And he says to you, you're looking great, babe. Keep it coming.

And you just have to trust what he's saying, right? Because you can't see visually because of fog or whatever.

Well, one second later, or maybe a half second later, you see the deck, and then you're bored. He'll say that to you at a half mile, the radar controller says half mile. Call a ball or execute a wave off, and you take a second peek and nothing there. See A white glow from the deck. But if you're on centerline and on glide slope, you're going to be okay.

He's tracking that via radar or he's.

Yeah.

Because he can't see you either, right?

Yeah. What the ship does, it's. It's different now I think, but it's essentially sort of the same. The F4 had a radar reflector on the nose gear and the ship's track. While scan radar would lock onto that receiver. Otherwise it might lock onto the wingtip. And that will keep you on. If you flying accurately the way you're supposed to, everything will be when you break out, you'll be on centerline, on glideslope with the Senator Meeple and basically don't with a fuel black oil ship. Constellation was a black America before it. They were both black oil ships. They have a stack gas problem. But actually with a nuclear powered carrier you have the burble that comes around the wind coming around the island. I'm told you could feel that too. But with a fossil powered ship you had a lot of marble.

So you're hitting turbulence basically right there.

Yeah. A tenth of a mile from touchdown.

Yeah.

One time I had my mask loose and you could smell it.

My mask wasn't tight enough.

What was you. Do you remember your first carrier landing?

Yeah, I do.

How'd it go?

I thought that was pretty great. That's all I remember. I remember being on a catapult though. On it was a Randolph with hydraulic cats. It was one of the only ships left with hydraulic cats. They'd all been converted to steam. When they put the angle deck on them, these old Essex and Yorktown class ships, they put steam catapults in them, but they put some of them, they put hydraulic cats in. And Randolph was still. It was a wonderful clean, well run ship. I thought what a little. I know. And the captain was very friendly to me because I was an oddball. I was coming across Air force officer, he had been told, come on up on the bridge. It was very nice. At any rate, sitting there getting ready to get on the hydraulic cats on Randolph. I remember thinking to myself, I don't have to be doing this.

I remember thinking, if I say I don't want to do this, they'll stop right now. I must be crazy. I did it. Boom.

But was that your first cat launch?

Yeah. And they told you over and over again, these are hydraulic cats. Bob said, you're a pal and instructor. He said, now make sure you're all the way back. Make sure, you got your elbow locked because it's a hell of a bang. And you get on your first 15, 20ft, you get 80% of your acceleration right up front and then you sort of just trundle down the rest of the way. So I was ready. Boy, all the way back in the seat, head back and elbow locked. I didn't think about my knees when that thing went off. My knees were up here somewhere. But the F9, I think the F A18 is the same way you can take the shot, hands off and then grab the stick as soon as you're out over the water.

So I still had my hand on the pole, but I had to get my knees back down.

Is the hydraulic harder to launch than the steam because the steam is more gradual buildup or something?

Yeah, the steam is smoother and it's a continuous flow. And I guess the new electric cats are that way as well. They're supposed to be even better, I guess. I don't know how they would be, but I guess there would be.

Now this is the time, like Dan Peterson, you guys are working like almost getting in this air to air combat where you're training at a level that really you hadn't trained before at, or the pilots hadn't been training this way, where we're going hard against each other all the time.

Yes and no in that. That was the beginning of the. I said in my talking to Dave via email, I said my only claim to fame here, being unusual, if you will, is the fact that I was there when what became Top Gun started. I was there. Sam Leeds, who's in Dan Peterson's book, came into various ready rooms and VF121 had about three or four of them, I can't even remember because they took the whole hangar and came in there and said, we're going to do the. A lot of F4s and some F8s too, were getting shot down by Mig 17s mostly. But our RA5Cs were getting shot down by Mig 21s because Mig 21 RA5C would be cruising at say 600 knots, taking pictures or going to its next spot to take pictures. And the MiG 21 would come downhill from 30, 35,000 at 1.2, 1.4 or something like that and launch a Soviet. What was the B model they had stolen from us? Sidewinder and shoot down the RA5C. That was the big deal. Don't let your A5C if you're the escort. And I was lots of times, if you're the escort of the RA5C. Don't let him get. You have to keep looking back and up there and be prepared to turn into him for a head on with a sparrow. But at any rate, what was the question?

Well, I'm just trying to gather that eventually what I want to know is how well prepared you were when you went on deployment.

From a pilot. So like I was in the SEAL teams, we would shoot so many rounds through our guns. We would do so many immediate ax drills. We would do so many drills and so much training.

Yeah.

That by the time we went overseas, I felt really good. Yeah, I felt really good. And I'm trying to figure out where you guys would feel the first time you get on your first combat mission.

Well, there's nothing quite like getting shot at the first time. You do remember that? Yeah, but I remember the time they had some sort of an exercise where you flew down the coast and back up again and maybe went up as high as Hanoi and.

Seaport Haiphong at the mouth of the river up there and back and got aboard and came aboard. Big exercise. I remember looking out over northern part of South Vietnam and over into Laos and all that red. I thought, holy smoke, that's for real. It's only every one and every six, but you're not quite ready for that. And the first time you actually see it go going by, it makes you an older man immediately. I think. So where are we?

But you're training to get ready to get over there. Are you dog fighting, are you?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. One on ones. That's what you did in your training. You left Miramar and went out over the water. And the standard deal was your flight leader, you're the wingman, he kisses you off, you both turn 30 degrees away and you proceed until one guy turns in. You can turn in immediately or you can wait. If you're the younger guy, you wait until the older guy finally turns in because he can't see you anymore. You can barely see him. And you know his eyeballs are not as good as yours, but you turn in and make a head on it. And then you can see his wings flash. And he sees your wings flash and you make a head on pass. But that's not the way it is in combat. When you get into a combat situation, well, statistically it doesn't matter whether It's World War I, Korea or the Vietnam War. The guys who got shot down, the guys who didn't see it coming, it's like 99% of them. One guy Got shot down, let's say he said, yeah, he got it on me. And he pulled inside and he unloaded and he got me. But that's the exception. And moreover, 95% of the airplanes shot down. I popped a pee there in Vietnam.

Were with aaa, not with sams. Everybody, oh, Sam's this and sam's that. But no, when you're vulnerable and relatively close to the ground, that's when they got you. Especially when you could see it going by. You were in the envelope, if you will.

And that's just like a matter of chance in a way.

That's right. Well, better tactics. There are better tactics and poor tactics. And I think I wrote in. Is that my monograph there? A guy said to me, way back.

In Kingsville, they teach you to let it roll off on a wing, let the nose fall, acquire the target, adjust a little bit. And now you're watching the altimeter and so forth. I said, this is baloney. I want to hit the target. I want to put them right in the hole there. Pull down, up, invert, pull down some ros. Think you're crazy. The first time they're in the back. When you do this, pull down as steep as possible. Well, more than 30 degrees? You betcha. How about 60 or 70 degrees? The steeper you are, the safer you are, the faster you are, the better you are. And then I think I wrote in here.

Is there any compromise when you go to. When you go to come out of that dive and turn the airplane back.

Up towards the sky? Not really, because they've been through all that at Pax River. Say the flight test in the book, the manual that you have, either the NATOPS manual, the flight manual for pilots, or the tactics manual has all these tables in there. And you can say, if I get out.

Let'S say at 80 degrees angle of dive and I get out at 6000ft, I'll still be well clear. I have 1500ft of to clear. If I pull 6 1/2 g's to get out. If I pull 7, I'm even better off. But you lose power when you do that. I'm sorry. You lose airspeed when you do that. So you pull the G's, you're safe. A lot of guys would not do that, though.

But did you train this way before going to Vietnam? Did you know that the high angle attack was better? No. Or you figured out when you got there?

No, I figured it out in Arizona. Going over there to those targets that they have. I guess in the east coast they have Them all over the place too. Rural places. It's a huge plowed area plowed in a circle. And you got. They have two towers, wooden towers, 12 o' clock at 9 o', clock, 3 o', clock, and. And they talk to each other and they tell you where your hit was on the. And a white thing in the center. And they tell you, you bomb. But a guy told me, if you want to be safe, be steeper, be faster. I said, that's for me. And then I saw this picture, sort of famous, and you've probably seen it, of an airplane diving on a Japanese aircraft carrier at Midway. And the guy is 89 degrees. I thought, that is for me, that's how I'm going to do it. So roll inverted, pulling your nose down. Then you get your dive right there because your nose wants to come up the faster you go. In an airplane, whether it's a Piper cub or an F4 or F A18, your nose wants to rise as you build airspeed. It's just aerodynamics. So get the nose down there right now and then you can do whatever you want. F4, you could pull power to idle at 500 and it would hold 5. I don't know what they do in F A18s, but anyway, pull the power to idle at 500 almost no matter what your dive angle was.

What does that mean? Pull power to idle at 500. What does that mean?

Just pull the throttles all the way back to idle and it would hold 500 knots. Got it.

So you wouldn't increase your speed to some.

Right. I don't know why. It's just they discovered it, no doubt after they were actually flying the airplane. But if you go 550, it'll hold that. So a lot of guys would say 500 is fast enough for me. I got to pull out of this. I said, baloney. Look on the charts you can get out easy. They wouldn't do it. But I said, steeper is better.

The guy in the back says, you know, we were 560 knots tonight. Fine. I like that. I never got any holes. I got scared a couple of times. Well, got warned. I had a load go off right there that gave me.

You have your picture taken with an old style flash bubble, Spotsman. It gave me spots in front of my eyes that was that close, but no holes. So I never did. And there were guys that came back with a hole about as big as a.45 caliber bullet in the bottom of the airplane, but not me. We had leadership in the squadron. I Was in that. I kept going back to reading your book about how this guy, rural Gardner, the way he operated.

He was a former underwater demolition team guy, right? And so how did he operate?

He was very laid back, very quiet about everything. And.

We get after him about sharks, for instance, and he said, nah, he says, sharks don't bother you, but barracudas sometimes do. They curious. And they'll come right up to you and wonder what the heck you're doing and what you are.

That sort of thing. And he was the guy who would do the classic Navy routine, if you will. Tom, can you help me with this? As opposed to, Tom, get that done, rather, can you help me with this?

It's funny, in leadership terms, if you say to a guy, can you help me with this?

He may not really want to do it, but the way you phrase it makes you want to help him. If he says, do that or else, and you don't want to do it, it pisses you off 100%.

It's your style.

But it's effective.

In leadership terms. Very effective to use the old Navy way of doing things like that. I don't know how the Marine Corps operates, but I had a pal who got killed in Vietnam who told me, I will be a Marine general. He got killed being aggressive, I think, based upon what I heard about what happened with him. But at any rate.

I just wonder how the Marine Corps operates when the guy doesn't want to really do that, but he would if you had just asked him, as opposed to saying, do it or else.

Well, having worked with all kinds of leaders in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, the good leaders in all those organizations are the type that say, hey, I need some help with this. Hey, what do you think? How do you think we should bet? Good stuff and across the board. And then you take this into the civilian sector as well. The ones that bark orders and yell at people and say, you need to do this right now because I'm ordering you to do it. They're not ever considered to be good.

Leaders, but that's by and large the Air Force style. No exaggeration. Maybe my experience in the Air Force wasn't broad enough, but by and large, that's what they do there.

What, bark orders?

Yeah, yeah. That's maybe the. Having read his autobiography, you know, he didn't write it himself really. Really. But Ferdish LeMay talking about the way he operated in England in World War II, do it or else. Wait a minute.

Yeah, well, there's a whole thing to Talk about there. You know, there's this idea of the authoritarian people. Certain people have an authoritarian mindset. They're attracted to the authoritarian mindset. And the. When they look at the military, when they're 10 years old or 17 years old or 20 years old, they look at the military and they're, they're very excited about it because they think, oh, there's a place where if I have rank, people have to respect me, they have to listen to me. And so the military actually attracts these type of people. And most of the time, they, they. They kind of become not the best leaders, and they usually don't make it very far because they piss people off and, and whatever. Occasionally you'll have someone that gets put in the right circumstances, and despite the fact that they're a tyrannical leader, they're still able to advance. And, you know, Curtis LeMay is probably a good example that, you know, here he was in charge of bombing Europe, and he puts together plans like, hey, this is what we're doing. And it was an extreme situation, and it ended up working. And then he gets, you know, his, his.

They made him a hero.

Yeah, but exactly.

In his autobiography, he says that I had no choice but to. To begin to ascertain that we had to do it that way or else we wouldn't do it at all.

Yeah, yeah, so. So it can happen. But even, I mean, like I said, I've worked with Air Force, I've worked with Navy, I've worked with the Marine Corps, obviously, I've worked with the Navy, and the, and the leaders, and all of them are not tyrannical at all. Now, are there situations that you can get into where it's like, hey, we got it. This is what we're doing. Occasionally that happens.

Yeah.

But it doesn't really happen a lot. And yeah, now I'm also thinking with your old job in the Air Force where you're, you know, you've got. There's no room for any error because you're dealing with nuclear weapons. That probably. That probably emphasized that type of leadership more than. Because the other thing about authoritarian mindset is they don't do well in combat situations oftentimes because they have a very structured mind, they have a very predetermined way of thinking. So they get, they get thrown something that they didn't expect, and they just fall apart.

Yeah.

You know, the person that's great in Garrison, that's great at keeping everyone. Great at doing inspections, great at keeping everyone in the proper uniform, they get into combat where all of a sudden the enemy gets a vote and there's things happen they didn't expect and people are getting shot and a lot of times those people don't do well in combat scenarios.

Well, there's something about that. This occurs to me right now, is that on Constellation for that 10 month, 9 month cruise, I never heard of that happening. And you had two squadrons of A7s, two squadrons of F4s, one squadron of A6s, a detachment of RA5Cs and combat helo squadron from Japan, squadron, whatever they were. I think there were two armored heavy duty helicopters and the guys who stood by the machine guns, I never heard of anything like that, anything like that. Anybody screwing up or refusing or being unable to or anything, anything like that. And they were using real bullets and stuff there every night.

Yeah. Well, it's an interesting thing too about the Navy in general is that the Navy in its nature, when you know from its, from, from the past, you know, for you or my. If you were a commander in my fleet and I was going to send you and your ship somewhere, I wasn't gonna be able to talk to you again.

That's right.

Back in the day, except for flags.

Yeah. And all till you go over the horizon.

Right.

And then it was like up to you. Yeah. And so we had to, we had to exercise a decentralized command more than anybody else. And that really, when you, when you really pull the thread on the SEAL teams, that becomes very clear that that's one of the reasons why the SEAL teams has a reputation for being very adaptable and figuring things out.

Right.

Because we wouldn't get support all the time. And we had to, you know, it just being in the Navy, you, you, you had to figure things out. The other things, the other thing is in the Navy, historically, if you're on a ship, you can't surrender.

Yeah.

You can't surrender. You, you have to just fight until your ship goes down. There's no quitting because you'll die. So you end up with that attitude embedded as well in the mindset. But, but the, and I think, you know, there's a lot of that with, with pilots as well, is, hey, look, I'm going to do what makes sense for me in my aircraft to make sure that I stay alive. And you have to make those decisions for yourself. And so it's on you.

Well, when I was in Thailand, to my shock, flying with facts, Air Force facts, I never told him I was previous Air Force, I thought that's too controversial. I'm not going to get into that. I just let it go. And they see these guys, Air force guys doing 30 degree dives and I thought that's crazy. It has to be at least 45, at least 60. And of course what I did was as steep as you could get. Hell with it. I'm not going to get shot down here and so forth. But 30 degree dives, and I think they all did and they had the same charts that Navy had and the Air Force is known for charts. But maybe theirs were even better or more complete or larger than what we had. But you couldn't hit the ground.

Diving 60 degree dive in the middle of the night. Are you nuts? You can't hit the ground. What happens if they've got a tower up there? Well, you're still, you're going to be 1,000ft clear of that. So if you use a 6,000 foot release and a 550 degree dive, 550 knot dive and 500 knot release and 60 or 80 degree dive, you're not going to hit the ground. Don't worry about it. You won't do. Can't, you won't.

And what are you pulling? Seven GS at the bottom of that.

Six and a half is what we really did. I think if you look down while you're doing it, the needle's just doing that just above 6.

You would look down from time to time at that. If you're pulling out, you know, nothing else to look at anyway.

Yeah.

And I think that's a number you're saying. As I listen to you talk about it. It is a little surprising that you wouldn't do a steeper dive, especially in that airplane because you're also more accurate. You know where the bomb's gonna go. And to be Quite honest, like 6 and a half G's is not that hard if you get used to it and if it keeps you from.

From becomes ordinary.

Yeah, it's not that big of a deal. Any pilot could get used to that. I think the biggest problem is people don't like doing that stuff at night. And that to me is it's, it's interesting that more people didn't have the same logic that you had. Which is steeper is better. And I just do the math. I got a minute altitude to recover from and if I pull back on the stick I can survive 6 and F cheese, no factor. And I'll platform be fine.

Yeah. Because the engineering knowledge is right there on the paper and you could see it.

But a 30 degree dive seems I didn't even know that was even something that you were doing. That's a shallow. It's just a. It's especially in a place like that where ground fire, not the trip, not the SAMs. Although I know Sam's row is consideration. But AAA like a 30 degree airplane is a big giant airplane. There's just a lot of airplane to see. At 30 degrees where it's 60 degrees or 70 degrees, there's a very little amount of airplane to see. And I would think that's the math game you would be playing is a smaller platform the better.

I got one better than that. I was with this ov10 guy riding in the back with the binoculars and these two F4s showed up and they made about three runs from the same direction. 30 degree dives, one after the other.

That's crazy.

Are you nuts? You always come in from over there and then you made one dive from over there over here for your second. We used to drop pairs and we have six 500 pound bombs and make three runs with pairs but never from the same direction. Never. And when the lead goes in over here, trundle around a circle and come in from the other side because that means he's got to turn the gun all the way around over there because he was shooting at him. The thing is, that's another thing about the first guy in. In the movies, John Wayne is the first guy in. It's not a big deal. They're still getting the gun turned around and he's off the target pipe.

It's four.

Yeah.

Dash two, dash three and dash four are the ones that take it, huh?

That's right.

So. So you feel like you were pretty good prepared for that deployment. You were out bombing, you were doing these steep things, getting ready to deploy.

Yeah, I was getting better at that and I didn't get good at it until we were over there. And.

You know, they don't emphasize, they don't talk about the fact that there's a lot of flak and you will see it going by. They don't tell you that because maybe they're afraid of somebody saying not for me, I got a bad cold and I think I got a permanent cold. And maybe I'd do a lot better in Iceland than doing this. So I don't know. But.

The other thing about.

That being prepared was the advent. I said to David.

My real claim to fame here because I'm pretty ordinary actually was the fact that I was there when Sam leeds walked around VF121 and said, we're going to start this thing and maybe you might want to be part of it because we don't want to have any more F4s shot down by mig17s, not so much 21s but mig17s.

What do they call it? Was it called the Advanced Gunnery School?

Do you remember what it was called?

No. They called it Navy Advanced Fighter Weapons School.

Okay.

Or it could, I think initially they said it might be called something like that. It was all very loose and I think they had okay for somebody on the admiral staff in North Highland, but it was very loose. And they said if you volunteer.

You'Ll fly extra time. And maybe you don't want to do it because it's going to be at six o' clock in the morning. And if you don't fly, you have to be here at 4:30 in the morning to man up and run the airplanes out and make sure everything on the airplane systems, engines and whatnot work and the radar works because you're going to have an experienced good guy in your back seat just for this morning exercise. So that when we put two 4 airplanes out on the parking ramp, they all work and all the radars work. So be ready for that. You, you will be here at 4:35 o' clock in the morning and you won't fly. Ooh. A lot of guys say, forget that.

So did you do it?

I did it, yeah. And.

It was. It was. And you will fly ACM Air Combat Maneuvering with our instructors and so forth. One of my claims to fame, flying with Sam leeds in an A4. They had at that point they had several generations of A4s and they had two seat A4s and I think a couple of single seats. They had a much bigger engine in them for the instrument rag at Miramar they had coupled with the big engines in them. And that's when they flew at imitating the MiG 17. Don't get close to this guy, he'll eat you alive. Which is true. And that's.

Duke Cunningham should have been shot down. He should have been shot down a couple of times. He was very lucky, just lucky. But at any rate, doing the wrong thing with Sam Leeds isn't my bragging point. One of the few ones he came in on me trying to suck me into a. What's called a scissors. It's two airplanes who do this. One trying to be slower than the other guy. And I rolled over the top on him and went to burner. And I was standing there upside down above him in Burner. And he said, I can still in my mind's eye see him looking up at me. And he said to me, I can't believe you're doing this. Which is the wrong thing to do. There would be a of lot last last resort with a MiG 17 because if you screw it up, he's going to kill you.

You were told Phantom and he was in an A4.

Yeah, but I was standing upside down on my tail in Max burner to do that. And Sam was a maximum nice guy. Dan Peterson is a little bit removed, a little bit standoffish sort of guy. Not a bad guy or anything like that, but a little bit standoff. But Sam Leeds was how the hell are you sort of guy. At any rate, he said to me, I can't believe you're doing this.

Aviation and stick and rudder stuff.

Okay, so now you're deploying to Vietnam. Do you just load on the aircraft carrier? You're on the USS Constellation.

No, you go on a mini cruise for.

Monday through Friday. What supposed to be or was for a month, for four weeks.

Before they let you near the ship. You have to pure karakwal. That's all you do. And we went to the east coast to do that. The bunch I was with and it was wintertime. Poopy suits back in those days. Rubber immersion suits. Did you ever wear one?

Absolutely. Yeah.

Good times.

What is this? In case you're eject into the waters.

Below a certain temperature, you die super fast. So you got to wear this immersion suit in case you eject into the ocean.

So it's just a big rubber suit that sucks.

I'm not going to complain about in front of a seal, but it's not cool.

No, it's the water and air temperature less than a certain number. And they're not supposed to leak. But everybody parachute riggers and people like that, don't worry, they all leak. And the other thing is getting into this thing, the zipper goes from here to down here somewhere. So how do you get your head through there? Basically shoulders up, get somebody to help you and pull it up over your head and then he lets go and it takes your ears off, so to speak, and pulling down because it makes a tight seal around your neck and above your neck. I guess you have no protection from the seawater either, but I don't know. And then around the wrists, so your hands are going to get ice cold. The problem is you in that maybe you know this in cold water like that North Atlantic and whatnot, you stop breathing. You can't breathe, you're fully conscious, but your diaphragm cools down and it won't work for you, so you're going to drown because now your swimming ability is falling and your diaphragm just will not make. Get oxygen for you, so you're done. But at any rate, my first traps in the F4 were in a poopy suit off Norfolk in March or February. I can't remember, not that it matters.

And then you board the carrier and you guys sail over on the carrier.

Yeah. Once you get. They give you. Well, they did. I don't know how they do it now, but in the Air Force, they gave you about four day traps. One, your initial, in my case, I flew aboard. If you fly aboard, you walk off, but.

You do your initial day trap, and then next day, maybe two, maybe one and so forth. Getting you used to the whole idea. And after you have about four, five or six, I can't remember what it was. Then you get your first night, which is thrilling. And.

Nick Farr. Nick Soho.

What's Nick Farr?

German.

What does it mean?

Not so. Oh, okay.

He's just being facetious.

Anyway.

I got my first night. They shot me off the bow of America, so CVA 66. And I thought, holy smoke, it's being shot into a cave. And I can't fly this crazy thing. Calm down, Tom, all right? You go up and around and get on the downwind. Don't look at the ship. They told you, do not look over at the ship. It will give you a case of vertigo or spatial disorientation. Do not look at the ship. What?

Just look at your instruments.

Yeah. And it was an overcast night and whatnot. So high overcast, I could see the ship in the corner of my eye over here. Driving on the downwind and driving on the down casito and took a look.

That's what I told you. Don't look at the ship.

Don't look at the ship. I did, I can tell you.

I don't understand why. Why does it freak you out?

I have no idea.

Is that the same thing they told you, Dave?

Yeah, like, so it's just. Just a spatial thing. You look out. There's no, like, what he's talking about. There's no horizon. You have no sense of where flat or level or the sky and the water meet. And so if you look over, which we all do, because you'll find the downwind. If you look to your left, the ship is there. You cannot not look.

The lights disorient you is to when you see lights, lights should either be up or down. So it creates disorientation which you can recover from by looking at instruments. But the don't look at the ship. Everybody's told the same thing.

There's no line between the blackness that is the water, the blackness that is behind the ship and the blackness that is over the ship. The ship is just sort of floating. Floating in mid air space.

Somehow or other I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it.

Do you ever get used to landing on the carrier?

Well, that's part this second part of this. So I got aboard and went below and there's a lieutenant commander, nice guy from Miramar who was there getting re upped to go to sea.

And I went to the wardroom on Constellation. The main wardroom was the second deck. So I went down there and got my coffee and I got my donut or whatever it was and he said pretty dark out there. And I said phew. I had no idea. I thought I would know but. But he said, well, you'll get used to it in the daytime. It gets to be fun in the daytime. Which is true. But nobody ever likes it at night.

Which is True.

Dave confirmed 100%.

Daytime can be fun. Nighttime not so much.

That's right. That's 100% true.

Full moon is pretty easy.

No, it's worse because you got shadows and you'd make a turn and the moon is there and it puts a light across your cockpit and travels across and it gives you a mild case of spatial disorientation. You don't want that. Black is better. And then you're just on the gauges and that's an end of it until the guy says three quarters of a mile, call a ball.

And assuming you're on centerline on glidesclope at that point. Point. It's basically you just got to wait it out. But that's how I got in trouble, which is in those notes. You looking at my notes?

Different notes, but it comes from the same thing.

Yeah.

What got you in trouble? I'm interested.

Just lower your nose in close, come down one wire. Not good.

Well, what happened?

Well, you bolter.

What's that mean?

I'm sorry, no wire. You don't get a wire and the lights come on and you're off the angle.

You're too high in to land. Stay too high, you miss.

It can happen. You can be innocent. And the wires are staggered, they're not the same space. So that if you have a hook skip, you can Even hook, skip, two wires. It has happened. And off the angle you go and rats.

What'd you call it? What's the verb for it?

Bolter.

Bolter.

B O L T E R. That.

Means that you missed the wire.

Yeah. And the lso, he's very helpful. You know what he says? Bolt a bolter. Yeah. Thanks a lot.

And so as soon as you miss, you have to floor, you have to full power.

When you touch down, you go to full power regardless. Okay. Yeah. Basic engine. And from time to time on the F for it anyway, the engines would be slightly misrigged and one of them would go to min burner. And then the ship would go apeshit and tell me, oh no, you've got to do yelling at you come out of burner and things like that didn't mean anything.

So you have the bolter bolter. Then what happens? She said he got you into trouble.

Yeah, I guess. The ship is on the same. Their radar facility, the CCI is on the same frequency. And they hear the LSO say bolter bolter. And they'll say 212 continues straight ahead to 500ft, turn left heading Los and so which would be a crosswind. And then you do that climb and maintain 1200ft or 1000ft or whatever it is and turn left to us. And so then you're on the downwind and then they will. You have more planes coming in, coming down from the holding chute, if you will. And they'll squeeze you in in the middle there.

Or they take you way down until one guy is early and one guy is a little. You push over from those altitude at an exact. You're supposed to. To the second timing from the stack. And some guys are a little bit early, some guys are a little bit late. So they can squeeze you in and they squeeze you in in there. And then you get a little board the second time, we hope. But at any rate, how do you bolter, if you hook, skip or you're high and lay along. So I got in trouble because I boltered and I'm not going to do this two nights in a row and it's almost unconscious. Lower nose in close.

What? That's a move that you make to try and make sure.

And that airplane comes down like a safe.

And they also call it taxi. One wire.

In that you land before or your hook does well before the one wire and you taxi into the one wire.

And thank heavens we're aboard. That's enough for this for tonight and so forth. So out of the next, say, 10 nights, I got. Well at the end, let's say I got six. Come down in close. So rule Gardner came to me and he said, tom, in the passageway too, that's another thing. Laid back and it passed away. Tom, I don't want you to fly tomorrow and you're not on the schedule because I don't like this and I don't want to make Pamela widow.

We had been married about.

14 months at that point. So he said, I want you to think about it. This is not a punishment, but I want you to think about lower nose and close and so forth. Fly that many ball to touchdown, that was the end of it.

But that's the way he was leadership again, very laid back. I don't want you to fly. Rather than almost indicating if you wanted to fly badly enough, go to the schedules office and putting yourself back on the schedule. But no, he didn't do any of that.

So you bolter boltered one time.

No, like four out of six. The week before. And that's why he did that.

So once it got in your head.

And it's almost unconscious, I think Dave can vouch to that. You do it without really thinking about it. You don't say, I'm going to. As I get past the ramp, I'm going to lower the nose. It's a bad habit that you don't know why you do it and you do. So after you sit down for 24 hours and think, that is dangerous, that is stupid. And you've seen pictures, flight deck pictures of lower nose. I'm not going to do that anymore.

Is it a case of overcompensation, Dave? Like subconscious overcompensation that you put. You get over the ramp and just crank it down a little bit because you want to be early, because you don't want to be long.

I think that feeling the. The first time you bolter at night is a really awful feeling because all you want to do is land. Like you just. You would trade anything you have just to be on that flight deck. And so you do all this work. Tom was talking about the timing down to the second. There's a lot of work to get you to three quarters of a mile. It's a lot of work from the stack down to the end of the Runway or into the ship. And typically when you bolter, it's because in the last probably three seconds of a however long or less than that. Yeah. Or two seconds, you make one little error in the last two seconds and it pushes you past the wires. By five feet and then you're back in the air again and you, you don't want to be there. And so I think in your mind, you say, when I get in close, the term is called in close to at the ramp, it's the last three or four seconds of flying. I am not going to add power. He mentioned something earlier about something called the burble, which is a real thing. And the wind that goes over the flight deck, especially in a conventional carrier that has to make its own wind, meaning it has to run the engines to get speed. You have to have 30 knots of wind over the flight deck. That burble, the way the wind goes over the flight deck and right at the end of the Runway, it curves down towards the water, will literally pull your airplane down just a couple of feet. But if you want add the burble three or four feet, it's going to pull you down.

And that destroys part of your lift as well.

Absolutely. And then that set, that psychological piece of I am not going to go high. That six or seven foot difference will put your plane in the back of the ship and literally blow it up. That's the videos he's talking about. And I think the combination of those two creates a really, really dangerous combination of the psychology you talked about and the actual aerodynamics of it. And I would say just a high majority, if not almost all of the mishaps around the ship aren't really because of mechanical or engine problems. It's because of that scenario. And the LSOs probably went to the CO and said, hey, you got to talk to this guy because he's gonna, he's gonna kill himself. And that's when the skipper, you know, and I'm obviously putting words in his mouth based on common experience. I didn't talk about it specifically, but it sounds like I'm hitting close to.

The mark of that feeling. Yeah, that's what happens. It's all very laid back too. As a matter of fact, the LSOs, he, earlier that night said to you, tom, this is your third bolt of lornos in close in a row. This is not good. You gotta work on this. And then four hours later, he came to me in the passageway and said, we're not going to do this. We got to change.

Dave, how many times have you. You bolter. Bolter?

I probably so. On my first cruise, I had no bolters. On my second cruise, I had one boulder.

Oh, boy.

In training, when you're talking about CQ night cq, I bet I had at least One, if not two bolters at night.

What's night cq?

No, I'm sorry. Night carrier qualifications.

Got it.

The night before you deploy.

Before you deploy.

So the night CQ.

I had probably a relatively small handful. Once you're on, you know, like on cruise and underway, it's not. It doesn't happen all that often. But the thing that's crazy is probably some of the worst flying you'll ever do is off the coast of California because It's overcast at 800ft all the time, even though it's beautiful Southern California weather. So it's pitch black underneath that overcast, even if there is a full moon because there's a big cloud layer there. And the Pacific Ocean likes to move around. The ship moves around, and it sucks. It's awful.

He flew a much harder plane to get aboard the ship than I ever did.

So what's here you're talking about? You might have had four of these in your career, and you had four.

Of them in six, five nights.

That's enough to freak someone out for sure.

I don't know. The F4 was an ancient airplane, in a manner of speaking. And the F A 18 is a different breed of cat completely. And I was told the FA18 is actually fun airplane, easy airplane to fly, and then you have to work to get really good at it. But that's something else. The F4. First time I flew the F4 with my instructor in the back cockpit, we went back take off and out over the Pacific off Miramar and headed north. And he said, you can level off here at 15,000 or more or less, it didn't matter. And I tried to level off and I thought, I can't even fly this thing straight and level.

But the F4 was designed to be an unstable platform. And then they put three axial axis stabilizing devices in there. And the early models had a single switch. And then they put three separate switches for pitch, roll and yaw. And a lot of guys at the end, I'd turn the roll off. Most guys did total roll off. But at any rate, it was an unstable airplane. So if you touch the stick a little bit, it'll do that. You touch the stick, it turns off the stabilizing system. When you touch the stick, there are micro switches in the base of the physical hand grip. And as soon as you touch it a little bit, it turns off the roll stab, you pull back just a little bit, it turns off just a little bit. So actually, before you fly the airplane, they want you to get Familiar with the cockpit and so forth. They say to you, realize that this system is there, and if it's quiet, you can hear the micro switches click. And you can, but you just got to touch them. And you click it, click it, very faint, but they're in there. And it turns off the rollstead. So here you are, your first time out with this thing, and you touch it a little bit and it turns off the microstab, the stabilization in pitch. And it does one of these because you go the other way and it keeps it off and so forth. And you push it a little bit this way and it turns that off too. And then you go back and so forth there. It only turns it off for half a second or something like that. But if you hit it again, it.

Goes crack the other side.

Now so forth and so forth and so forth. Yeah, but the F A 18 is a modern airplane. The F4 was just an airplane that Mr. McDonald said, I want a monster. And I wanted to do this, that and the other thing. And if you have a problem with it, won't do that, add a system to do that. And they did, and they kept on doing that. And that's what you got. You got a hell of an airplane. But my favorite quote about the F4 was a Marine in one of the. One of the books, as you might suspect. I have airplane books and whatnot. And he said, I flew the F4 for three years and it never killed me.

So you're. So now you get to Vietnam. What's your mission? What are you guys doing?

Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ho Chi Minh Trail, Ho Chi Minh, Tri, Richerman Trail. That and Bar Cap. It was a bombing pause in the north. And the only things were going up there were RA5Cs to look at whatever changes they made, probably mostly in the airfields and also looking for SAM sites.

So you being a first cruise guy, you were not going to fly that escort until you did it. I think that's a Navy tradition. You can't do it until you do it. So for the first three or four months of that cruise, I didn't fly any.

Recce fighter escort up there. And then basically what happens is. And everybody, I think, is familiar with this.

Fred's sick. Tom, can you do this? Yeah, I can do that. So then you're the escort for the fighter for the RA5C. And then you're on the regular schedule for that after that. But that was the best flying I ever did in my life. That keeping with him.

So what would one of those mission profiles look like, well.

Launch and point towards North Vietnam, the coast. And.

They were always looking around. So half the time they would see you on radar. And you have receivers and that are playing. The F A 18 probably has better ones, far better ones than we had. And you see them looking at you as the sweep goes by and depressurize the carpet and.

Give yourself a little spacing on the RA5C. And he has promised that he will not go closer than 1,000ft to the undercast. He will be above 4,000ft of the. I'm sorry, the overcast. He won't be that close to the undercast. He will be four or five thousand feet above the undercast. He won't go faster. He won't use burner and about four other things. And then when you get into it, he does everything that he says he wouldn't do because he's shitting in his pants, too. Because they're looking at you once you're in there, they're looking at you with about three different. You can hear the different tones, different kinds of radars.

So what are they doing? What's the RA5C doing?

Taking pictures.

And you're just protecting it, right?

Because the Mig 21s shot down a lot of RA5Cs. And what they would do is they figured maybe they were going to do it today. And they put one or two MiG21s at very high altitude, above 35,000, because they get more speed out of it. MiG21 would go 1.8 downhill, easy. So they would wait until the RA5C turned away from where their loiter is up here and he's down at 2,000ft taking pictures and then come downhill behind him. So your job was to stay away from him and always be looking back there. This side too, because you never know, but always back here. And so stay away from him. What people.

In the US Tubes and things like that, called Thatch weave Commander Thatch invented that in 1944 or something like that. And it's absolutely Air Force. They always write with each other. And it's just useless and a waste of fuel. We always stay one mile, minimum mile and a quarter is a little better. So you can come back and so forth.

Watch out for MiG21. I wanted to be head on with a MiG21. Because with the F4 system, well before that, off the coast of California. Nobody ever told me you could do this, but I wondered against F8s. I put the pipper 35 mil pipper down the intake of an F8 and guess what happened?

The Sidewinder growled, which means it sees heat just looking down the intake. So I want to do that with a MiG 21, but I never got the chance. And I said to Jimmy, I said, when my best friend.

I said, so that you can claim we got him with a Sparrow. We won't know which because as soon as that Sidewinder leaves, I'm going to flip to. Because you got the Pipper on him. I'm going to flip to radar and pull the trigger a second time. So I said, when that mid guy sees, maybe the Sidewinder won't guide, maybe it'll miss him by 30ft and the kill radius is only 25 and stuff like that. But when he sees that sparrow coming at him, that monster sparrow, he's going to shit in his pants.

So anyway, how to get into this?

Well, I was just asking what that mission profile was.

Yeah, I saw it. Anyway, you follow him around basically at high speed. And he always said he wasn't going to use burner. And he had the same engines you have. And the J79 would put out, ordinarily put out a smoke trail. We got a Mod in the F4 late in the cruise that would stop that and fuel added and they had to put piping in to do that. But at any rate, you look over at him and he's not smoking. That means he's in min burner to get rid of the smoke. As soon as you did that, the smoke went away and you look down and the max low altitude speed on the F4 indicated airspeed was I think like 740. And you look at the indicated airspeed and he's not in burner. We're doing 790 indicated relatively close to the ground. We're smoking along here and then you come back and they know what you've been doing. Although it's a combat situation, nobody ever complains. But I have a picture of an F4 coming aboard with dents, big dents in all three tanks. Because you've been up there.

If not at the Mach, really close to it. The dynamic pressure dents the fronts of the tanks and maybe they don't do that anymore. Maybe put some sort of a reinforcement on the front end of the tanks. But those tanks were not reinforced in the noses and they were all dented from doing stuff like that.

This story is so cool for me because that's, that's like just classic naval aviation. What I always loved about flying with the Navy in the Marine Corps was he's talking about that forward, that missile he was talking about in training. Like the book says you can only shoot the missile from the back of an airplane. That's the rule. And that's how it works. And they tell you. And the coolest thing about flying guys in the Navy, like, I don't care what the book says, I'm gonna go try this works.

That's right.

This missile, which is on paper and designed to only shoot the back of a jet because the engines in the back, that's where all the heat is. These guys figured out I could shoot this thing we called Ford quarter in the nose. And the best part about that is you launched this at a mig. I guarantee you he would do exactly described. Because nobody else would do that. Yeah, the book says you can't do it. So I just like. I like listening to your stories of. I don't care what the book says. I'm gonna try this and see if it works. That F8, that big giant intake probably replicated a MiG minus 21's big nose with that big giant engine right in the front of the airplane. That's pretty cool thinking.

I like that. And he had a 37 millimeter gun too, in both those airplanes. And you better not shoot your pants too soon because he's going to be firing that thing on ahead on no matter which one it is at you now, you got a piece of bulletproof glass in the front of you. In the older airplanes, the F4 you did. So it shouldn't hit you in the face, I guess, but he's liable to ruin your radar, which could be a problem.

If he gets close to you with that head on. But as soon as you pull that trigger, he's gonna. He never saw anything like that in his life. And he's been told that the F4 has to get behind you, so don't worry about it. And that's what I always. And I said, jimmy, you're gonna be able to. We get that MIG with a Sparrow. Because that's the.

The radar operator's missile. It was a Sparrow.

And so what was it that made those recon missions so fun for you? Just that you're up there hauling ass around.

Well, this goes back to something I put in that deal. I heard Chappie James say it the first time, and I think it's common. But don't get in the airplane, strap it onto you. Chappie James was quite a guy. And I talked to him once. Once. But you know who he was?

No.

No, he was A black guy who was number two to Robin Olds in Thailand. And Robin Olds got all the publicity and all this. And Chappie James was the quiet guy who kept his place and so forth. But they made him a four star general.

He was.

The night I talked to him, he was at speaker at a dinner and he had the place in the palm of his hand. And then you figure he's probably winding up about now. And he said, you've been such a great audience, I'm going to sing a song for you. And I thought, oh, the poor man, he's going to ruin everything. He had it made here and now he's going to make a fool of himself. He sang Old man river like a Metropolitan Opera. It was really, really something. So. And then he talked with the troops after everything was done.

Strap it on. Don't. So that was first time. And I felt that way, truly felt that way. Fly like the airplane is attached to you.

The other way around. Because when he. You want to stay a mile or a mile and a quarter a beam, what happens if he turns into you? Well, you go high and you come up here this way and watch him going around the bend. And then you can go to the. Because you're coming downhill, you're going to gain energy so you can go to the outside. If you figure his next turn will be into you again, well, then you can go up without adding power because as you go.

No, that's wrong. But if he turns into you, you can go high.

Would you fly with the same guy all the time in the backseat?

No.

The plane that you were covering for?

No. You didn't even know his name.

No kidding.

Yeah. And they were all. Because they lost a lot of young guys flying the RA5C early in its career, they switched to mostly senior guys with a lot of hours and a lot of strength traps, they would lose them at the ramp. So those guys were. Maybe they were all commanders, which is too old to be just an airplane driver on a carrier. But.

Because of the difficulty of getting the monster, that monster aboard heavy, their launch weight was a little over 80,000 on that thing. And the standard launch weight that has come to pass more or less is around 60,000. So 20,000 pounds heavier off or getting aboard. So they had senior guys doing that. I think there was one guy who was a lieutenant commander. But anyway, flying with him.

Flying.

I discovered I could fly like a bird. Because.

At that point in your training or in your experience level, you start to get that good at it. And I thought, holy smoke, I'm doing this this way. Even though at that point I had a thousand hours of total flying, maybe more than that flying experience. But it was something of a revelation to be able to fly where you wanted to go and not be limited by what the machine would do.

Especially with the F4 when you have all that power, and especially when you're about halfway through your fuel load, you have a lot more power because your weight is gone.

How long did the fuel last? How long did you have?

Well, the Cyclone Constellation in Combat Zone was.

Two and a half.

They called it a two hour cycle, but you wound up flying two and a half hours because they would launch everybody and then they would recover you. So I think they launched every two hours. I think that's how it worked. You know, I never thought of it quite this way. But at any rate, my traps on Combat Zone were always about 2.6.

Did you guys get gas?

Only from time to time.

That's a long time.

Yeah. And the F4 fuel gobbler. And you were always, always sweating fuel. Always sweating fuel.

The cycle time. They measure the cycle time when he's talking about on an aircraft carrier in the cycle time is launch to launch. So if it's two hours, that means a launch happens. And two hours later the launch happens. What's bad about that is if you're on a two hour cycle when you launch, you'll be the first one to go in your Phantom. And then two hours later, the next launch goes. You have to wait for all those airplanes to get launched before you recover. So that two hours is two hours from takeoff. To takeoff, you have to wait for everybody else on the next launch to take off before you can land. So that two becomes two and a half and 30 minutes. An extra 30 minutes is a lot of time to manage your gas.

That's. You burn £100aminute.

Yeah. That's a lot.

£100Aminute.

Yeah. That's £6,000.

£6,000 an hour.

Yeah.

How about hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, doing those bombing runs?

Well, you always had a. Well, what you do is. No. And your flight later, I was always going 1. Your flight later would call.

I think it was a piston engine Lockheed Constellation that was out over the water south. And he would ask you what you are and what your ordinance was. And he'd come back and say, your fac is going to be camera tutu. And he is currently at the less and so tack Ann. And he will meet you at the thus and so and thus and so of that tacan, which would be somewhere in northern Laos.

And he'll be there in 12 minutes. He's on route right now. So you would go there.

And you'd go there and wait a couple of minutes because if you called him up early, he'd say, I'm. I'm going as fast as I can, and so forth. So anyway, then he'd call you up and say, I'm in your area now, here's what we're going to do. And he had what they called logs. They were pieces of wood that were 4 inches square and about 2ft long. Had holes drilled longitudinally in there. And they had Willie Peet inside. And he had a way. Maybe they had a fuse or something. I don't remember that light that. And he would fly over the spot, more or less where he wanted you to go, and he would drop it out a trapdoor that he had in the bottom of the airplane. Is this true?

And then he would go drop a second one. He said, do you have my two markers? And you'd say, yeah, okay. He said, now, they are northeast and southwest. So remember, they're northeast. They're not north and south. They're northeast and southwest. And what you want is on a triangle pointed to the north.

But to the northeast and sort of. And there's a crossroads there. Can you see the crossroads? And sometimes you could on a moonlit night. He said, okay, now, not the crossroads, but this is why. This is really what you. And you say I drop another one. But we don't want to alert them because the trucks are all parked right now. But there's a grove of heavy trees. Can you see those? No, you can't. I would always turn my lights out after get off the ship. And.

How would you put it? Comfortable for a couple of minutes. I'd turn everything off because I had a good best RO in the back.

And of course, you can hear something's amiss in the airplane. What's that ticking? What's that thumping? Whatever. The engines don't sound right. You can hear all that even with your helmet on. So I figured. And warning light panels for galore. So I figured. Turn it out. The human eye takes. You probably know this. It takes about 30, half an hour. The same length of time takes the sun to set. So. So after half an hour, you can see everything on the ground and the facts. Talking about that grove of trees. Yeah, I can see what you're talking about. I can see where those roads are. I only started doing that after about two or Three months. Because initially you don't know what you're doing.

Turn the lights out and turn the panel lights all the way down, the warning panels. Any warning lights, low fuel or anything like that that doesn't turn down, as you might figure. So I figured with a good guy in the back.

He'Ll let me know. So at any rate, and then you're almost like, almost daylight when your eyes get truly acclimated, you see everything on the ground. Even if there's just the least little. No moon, but just stars, you can see stuff on the ground. So at any rate, that's.

Were you always running nighttime missions?

99, 95, 99%. What would cause a daytime mission new on Yankee Station? The first day, maybe day, two days.

But then after that all nights. And you'd be on Yankee station for 31, 32 days.

Well, what's Yankee Station? What is it?

Northern Gulf of Tonkin. Northern Gulf of. Initially they had a second carrier they called Dixie Station off of South Vietnam, but then they stopped that and they would have two carriers.

Up north on Yankee Station. But anyway, you turn lights out and you could see everything at night. And the guy says, can you see the dark, the trees? And skipper wouldn't be able to see him because he, he's got older eyeballs than me and he didn't turn his lights out or turn them out completely. That's what I would do. He had good RO too. And he stole my good RO when his RO got taken by the Admiral to be part of his staff. Then he took my ro. And then I had a teenager who didn't know what he was doing. He was right out of the Naval Academy. Anyway.

So he'd give you those coordinates and he said, can you see the trees? That is just to the south of where that intersection is. And he said, yeah, anywhere in those trees because it's full of trucks there and so forth. Sometimes you would get there and you'd see headlights, but rarely, rarely. And as soon as they really hear you, they would run back to the truck and turn the lights off or turn the engines off, I guess, at any rate, and then you do that. But see that thing there that you read early on? That was, you know, when Lyndon Johnson.

Had his bombing pause in North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese took all the guns that used to be in North Vietnam and put them over in Laos to guard the Ho Chi Minh trail over there. So.

Where was I? The guns and so forth.

Well, how often were you running into like, you know, you mentioned the anti aircraft, the Flak that you're flying by the surface to air missiles. How often did you run into that? Was that every mission?

Every time? Every time. But they were cool about that, you see, you'd get there.

Who was cool about that?

The gunners on the ground.

The enemy gunners?

Yeah.

What way?

Well, they'd know you were there because they could hear you.

And in your orbiting, what I would do immediately as soon as we get there, I'd separate an altitude, I'd go a thousand higher on whoever was usually rural gardener, but I'd go a thousand higher and I'd cut across and turn. Every naval aviator is a left hand turn expert. They all turn left. In fact, one time I met a guy in Philadelphia who had the same dog as I did and I started talking with him and then I saw him a second and a third time. He said, what'd you do before you did the ad business? He said, I was a naval aviator. I said, son of a gun. So was I. How about that? So at any rate, in that office it was street level, I had an old IBM computer and I had the Microsoft flight simulator early on version of that on that computer. I said, come inside and look at this thing. I took it off, made it take off and turned right. And he said, what the hell kind of a naval aviator are you.

Instead, Sims? I can't remember. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Sims. Nice guy, nice guy. At any rate, I would turn, I would orbit to the right and I knew that he was going to roll in from 1 8. I would roll in anywhere the top of the, of the quadrant of the compass rows.

So what made what the gunners do cool? You said the gunners cool.

They you make yourself present because you're making all that noise right over here over the crossroads. And they know the gunners will know the trucks are over there and they know that and they know that you know that because they can hear the fact flying around too. So they would wait until you roll in until you commit. The problem is they had to get a handle on you when you start down because they also know, I presume that they, they knew because you're going to pull the power to idle and your engines get very quiet as soon as you do that. So if they didn't have a bead on you at that point, I'm convinced too that they used a simple auditory way to track you. I think my idea is that if you took a bunch of paper towel tubes and put tape around them and put a microphone behind them and then you put that on the mount of a gun. We had a gun, the barrel got overheated and it warped. So we got this gun mount over here. We don't use it. Put that auditory search finder thing on the gun. Because then as soon as I turn it over there and I can. I got headphones on and I can hear it. There he is. Oh, I lost them. No, I got them back again. But the point here is that the azimuth and elevation on that auditory device, if you have a simple system, you can all the five guys having 57 millimeter or even 85 millimeter pieces around here, they know where you are because they can read what he is, tracking you in an auditory fashion. So they wouldn't open up sometimes until you release pull and add power. And as soon as you did that, yeah, there's shit going by from the back and most of it right there because they had time to know where you were and they could hear you in orbit. And now this guy was over here and so suddenly he got silent. That means he's in the dive. So that means he's going to be over here, turn their guns around. Moreover, the guy who, with the auditory, half a dozen paper towel tubes taped together, he can hear you even if you've got your engines at idle. I think that's my private theory. I don't know if that's true or not. But at any rate, that's when they would open up on you. And yes, every, every night, no question, every night, anytime you were there, they would blast away at you.

Did you guys lose any aircraft while you were on deployment?

Not my squadron, no. The ship lost, I don't know, four or five, maybe more. A7s. No, A6s. A6 guys, I think were pretty cagey. A7 drivers. They all tended to be, seemed to me, younger guys in the wardrobe sitting there. The guy said, man, I had a hell of a time tonight. I was mixing it up with these guys. They had a 57 millimeter in a cave on the side of a hill. I don't know how they got it up there, but I made, I came back around and gave him another load of 20 millimeter. Really? I said, you know, he's sitting that far across the board and table. I said, do you realize what the aim point is? It's the airplane. I said, no, no, no. The aim point is right between your eyes. You're nuts. Put a 500 pound bomb into that hole. If you any good as a bomber, you can do that. Put a bomb into his cave. That's the end of that gun? No, it's more fun. I went around a third time and. You're crazy. He's going to shoot you down. You're going to feel really stupid. You throw away your weapon. Is what you do when you get shot down, you have a responsibility to. In your book, you talk about.

Things that are worth it and things are not worth it. I'll tell anybody who's willing to, including my old skipper or somebody like that. I said I have a favorite. Switch position down by your left knee in the F4. It's an all.

It does all the bombs.

Not the missiles. The missiles stay, but the bombs. You have singles, pairs, doubles cluster, all and some and then all flip all. This is bad here tonight. I don't want to be here. I'll be back tomorrow. But for tonight, all, see if you can eat this load. There's only six of them. For heaven's sakes.

What, 6, 500 pounders?

Yeah, that was our standard bomb load, 6, 500 pounders.

As the deployment went on. And you're going out facing this every night, night after night, Is it every night? You're flying every night?

Yeah. When you were in the Gulf, you flew every night.

How's this wearing on you mentally?

Not bad. I think at that age you're in your late 20s. I was in my late 20s. No, not a big deal. Except that the air conditioning on some ships was not very good. And Constellation was one of them. A flight deck or the O3 level.

You get to a Navy guy, man, that air conditioning pisses us off all the time on a.

Well, how about if you just had good ventilation, you know, you have 85 degree air outside. Put 85 degree air in this room. Really nice, you know. And my stateroom was on the 03 level, the 04 levels of flight. So there are places in the ship where the air conditioning really did work beautifully. But we got visited by ABC or CBS News or something like that. And they were on Hancock, which was in the Gulf at the same time at that time. And one of these guys said to me, boy, we could see this ship on the horizon. He said, this ship is nice, the Hancock. But next week we're going down to get aboard the Big guy. Air conditioning doesn't work here. And the food's not real good.

Better on the Hancock in every way. I said, well, fortune's a war, I guess. Yeah.

I had a guy on the podcast named Dean Ladd, who's a Marine in World War II, and he went into a Bunch of different islands. But he was talking, he's going into Tarawa and I'm like, were you nervous going in? He said, no, it's the other guys that are going to get wounded and killed.

That's right.

He ended up getting gut shot in Tarawa and was lucky. A couple of his Marines disobeyed the order just to keep going and they grabbed him and threw him back on a ship. So I think that's the common. The common mental state of the young man in combat.

That's right.

I really feel sorry for the other guys that are going to have trouble out here and get wounded and killed.

My favorite professor in college, University of Chicago, PhD, that's a big deal in econ.

Was a tail gunner in B17s in World War II. And I used to play chess with him. And I said to him, what was it like? He said, you always figured the other guy's going to get it. That's the same thing you just said.

That's pretty. A pretty impressive statement for a tail gunner. B17 in World War II.

He was a teenager. Yeah. And he said, you know, always fortunes of war. You figure the other guy's gonna. Or you can always jump out. You know.

That would be the worst of it that you had to bail out.

Any other highlights from that deployment?

Well.

Skipper said to me, we want to send somebody over to Thailand. And since you have Air Force experience, would you like to do it? Yeah, why not?

And this is to be a forward air controller or something?

No, just to.

Make some judgments and come back and relate how they do things over there and how the facts work and stuff like that. So I said, okay. And so they took me over in a cod and. And we did not get shot at in broad daylight. COD went out in daylight and we didn't get shot at crossing or anything. Out into U Bahn is where I went, where Robin Olds was when he made his five kills and stuff like that. And initially hard to get to first base there. I said, it was like in the movies. They. And the COD pulled out onto the grass and the crewman opened the back door and I hopped out. I had shut down the starboard engine and door slammed, starboard engine started up, taxied away. I was standing there with my suitcase on the grass. This is just like a goofy movie from France in World War II or something. Anyway, so I got a guy, a trooper walking down the tarmac somewhere and I said, where's base operations? Down the street. But you don't want to go there. Why? Because we're not allowed to be here. We're guests. Oh, where do I go? Building 386. It's on the second street over, and it has 386 on the outside. And I'm making this part up, but there's a button, the essence of it. That's the operations you want. So I didn't have a place to sleep or anything. My little suitcase. So I went there and I got a Marine, no, Air Force trooper. Big guy, big guy with a sidearm and a little lectern inside the door. Basically, he says, who the hell are you? I'm in a Navy uniform. And.

And he said, not without whatever he needed.

So that night I went to the club and I meet a guy, an Air Force major, and he said, yeah, we can take care of you. We'll get past that. Don't worry about it. And he took care of everything and stuff like that. But their Air Force operations were officially just a guest, and they were just unofficially airplanes. The tarmac loaded with F4s and C130. So I got to fly with a guy who flew the OV10, which is a heck of a fun airplane to fly. Man, oh, man. I swap ends in a second with that thing. I mean, this way, that sort of thing. Tons of power. Two turboprop engines and designed for the Marines, So you could put one in a couple of guys in a back. And I opened a hatch in the back, and the marines can parachute out into middle of nowhere and stuff like that. And a good panel in the back. I made an instrument approach with that guy, and he said, that's really something off that terrible panel back there. I said, yeah, well, you make about 100 passes at the ship at night, and it's not a big deal anymore.

I flew with him maybe twice, and I flew with the C130 gunship. A C130 forward air controller. Only at night for him, though, because he's a big target, I guess.

We had flown off of that guy, but we didn't know what kind of airplane he had. And let's see. The OV10. And two times with the C130. It was only there a week.

And then back out to the ship.

C130, no, C47 had.

About eight or 10 Marine troopers who were there on R and R at Yuba in Thailand. They had been downtown, and they all looked at.

Big night last night. I don't know where they wound up going, but they dropped me off at Hu. It was right after the battle of Hue. That destroyed everything. And right next to the Runway, mat Runway. And when we landed on that mat Runway, they're shooting at us because it goes rattle, rattle, rattle. And I thought, my God, there's something. But that song was just a plank Runway. And then the army was there, and I thought, boy, sandbags and logs and mud. Oh, thank heaven I have no part of the army. And anyway, they sent the COD in there, and the COD picked me up and took me out to the ship. So that was the end of that. But that was quite an experience.

Those C130 guys, they had cojones.

They've sank their parachutes back over here, and they have a pile back there. Really? What do you do if you get hit? Because in my mind, you get hit, you might take the whole wing off or the end of it, and then it starts to tumble, and you're not going to have time to put on a parachute. But they did. I think they lost more c130s than they ever admitted to over there. Because the one I was on a gunship, he's at 3,000ft. And the 37 millimeter gets to 30,000ft, and a burst went off in front of the nose. And I hit the deck behind the flight deck on that airplane. I was on the floor as we flew through the smoke, and they said, what was that? I said, for heaven's sake. It went off, right? Yeah, but it falls away. Don't worry about it. All right. But we flew through the smoke. I saw the smoke go over the windshield, you know, and I got to fly the C130 a little bit. Just steer it around, you know, not a big deal. But anyway, that's what I did in Thailand. Then I came back to ship, and Guy said, what about this and what about that? And that's when I saw those F4s making multiple passes from the same direction at 30 degrees, at 30 degrees, dive. And not just the same direction, but both airplanes from the same direction. So.

Maybe you're losing airplanes. And I think I know why. No talking them out of it. I think if you are encouraged to think that 60 degree angle of dive is dangerous, you'll believe it.

But it's not. It's safer. It's a better way to gun. And when I saw that picture, I don't know if I said this, now there's a famous picture taken during the Battle of Midway, and that guy is virtually 89 degrees above a Japanese carrier. So that's the way to do it. I thought, besides, you got to get the Barrel all the way up there. Maybe you can't do that.

So you get done with that deployment.

Head back to the States now it's what, 1970?

Yeah.

And, and you're coming back to America now. Now you got the, the protests and all this stuff going on. Was that, are you seeing that? Are you aware of the, that how's that impacted you?

Very much so. And I think you just get used to it. The thing that you wouldn't get used to if you were a newly married guy, and that was me and a lot of other guys too, that they would call up your house and say, telling you that, tell your little wife that you had been killed that night. This is stateside before you went to sea. Very evil. That's evil. And then of course we had, there were a couple of bad actions. There was a Navy cod, I think an old one with a bunch of guys on board that crashed on San Clemente before we sailed. And that was very bad. And it made my wife very squirrely. My young wife. There's a funny thing, this is a funny one here. I went to the east coast and I flew out to the east coast. So then I have to ride back. So we're on a DC4C4051 or God knows what, four engine unpressurized Navy transport and we get to Houston and the guy says, ah, we'll be here overnight because the.

On the third engine or something. That's not right. So be prepared. We'll have it. It'll be ready by morning. So at any rate, we were supposed to be back at Miramar by 6pm more or less. I sent her, called her or something from the east coast, from Norfolk. So she calls the duty officer and the white hat sailor who's on duty too. He answers the phone and she says, this is Mrs. Coppel. Is my husband going to be there tonight with his eta? And he says, oh no, the airplane went down in Houston. Jeez.

So now wait, it gets better than that. She figured she was a widow, what to do about this the next morning, coming up the side of the building or two guys with gold braid on their sleeves. She said, well, this is it. Steal myself. They're going to tell me what happened. I walk in the door.

Anyway, funny story. And she still likes to tell it to her friends from time to time.

Oh, man. So there is, there's this 1970, you come home, there's obviously a lot of division in America.

And what do you end up doing when you get back?

Well, the.

RE asked Tom if he wants to stay or go. And I said, my father in law offered me a job, so I'm going to go.

Too many dead friends by that point too. And I said, I think I'll just get out. And they said, well, we want to send you to be an ACM instructor at Kingsville. And I said, I don't want to go back to Texas, I don't like that place. He said, well, we could send you to Meridian, but it's only basic instruction. I said, that's for me because a pal had told me that he got plowed back at Meridian and it's really nice place, nice people there and everything. So I said, let me go to Meridian. And so they put me in Meridian and I was an instructor there for my last something like 14 months. And I had good students and mediocre students and so forth. I wonder what happened to the best of them. I've typed his name into Google and no, I don't know, who knows? I had Marines, bloody old marines as one guy. I was his instructor and then his pal. I flew with him a couple of times. They were recon Marines, which is this Navy SEAL level stuff. And I foolishly said to one of them at one point, this is really foolish, this is naive. I said, you get heloed into Northern Laos and you get dropped off in the jungle and you know you're going to be there for at least a week with plenty of ammunition. Really, what do you do? He said, well, we hunt for the North Vietnamese. They train up there and they're in the jungle and they're easy to find because they smoke so much ganja that you can smell them if they're upwind from you. Oh really? So what do you do then? He said, well, you move around so you are in fact downwind. And then you get close enough to them and you set up with your weapons and whatnot and. And you wait till dawn till they start walking around. Yeah. Then what'd you do? Oh, well, we kill them all. Oh, excuse me, I was a little naive there.

But these are. Anyway.

And the guy who was my student, I wonder what a nice guy, both of them nice guys.

He would say to me, Tom, we were first name base, even marine captain at that point. Tom, Tom, Tom, how do you do a barrel roll attack? See that guy over there? Make a barrel roll attack on that guy Rich. I'm not supposed to do that, you know that. Come on.

Make a big rolling thing on the student flying. Students never look around. He's flying over there. Big mock. Wow. Let me try it. You go way over here. He tried. That's angry or the other thing with him. You fly in the back cockpit. You have them set. All fighter planes or Navy trainers have rear view mirrors. If you need rear view mirrors in a fighter plane, you're wasting your time. You are long gone.

When I came back. Or let's say from halfway through the cruise. You become a nutcase in the cockpit. At least I did. I want to know everything that's on the horizon 360. That's the only way to genuinely be certain you're going to survive this thing and stuff like that. So you become a minor nutcase. Looking around, looking around and so forth. And to which a young guy would say, how the hell you fly the airplane if you're spending that much time? Well, you do. You get skilled at it. It's just time that you get better and better at doing it. But I would have them turn their mirrors so I could see this much of their face. Everything else is oxygen mask, helmet and oxygen mask. But I want to see this part. I want to see where they're looking. I don't want you to see you, Mr. Wilson, looking at the panel. I want you looking outside. Mr. Wilson, you're down in the panel again. I want you outside the cockpit here. Well, Mr. Coppell, I have trouble flying level. I said, I'd rather see you bumping around in a little off altitude than getting shot down later because it's that important and so forth. So with Rich Freeman, I wouldn't like all of them. So I'd see him trying to fly level and make. Mr. Rich, I want you to make a 30 degree angle and roll out a 2, 7. Okay? And he's doing a little bit of this and he starts to get red in here. It's a Marine getting angry and not good thing. He said, rich, don't get upset. Remember I told you, you want to hold the stick with two fingers and trim off the pressure. Move it and then trim off the pressure. Two fingers, that's all you need. I really do it that way. Okay, well, try it again. I'll come back. Three, six. Okay. And comes back and he's getting redder. I said, rich, can you feel that in the airframe? Yeah. What is. I said, dick, that's me back here pounding on the pole. He's got it in a vice grip with white knuckles and his elbow in here trying to fly this thing. Rich, it doesn't work that way. But anyway, you got to relax.

I Guess.

I don't know. I don't know. I think when you come back.

And they're shooting at you and you get bored at night in bad weather, you're soaking wet and you're tired.

Do you burn more calories? I think so. There was a study done before the Vietnam War, and they did it with a 4s. And I bet you David knows about this. They asked these A4 guys to. Oh, no, it was during. At the beginning of the Vietnam War. That's how it would work. They had a recorder that put a pen mark on a disc of paper. And then they wired these guys with sweat and lung.

Function and heart function and so forth. And they found out that just what they figured out, go in and feet dry, and everything comes up. And you get in the target area, comes up even higher, get off the target area, comes down a little bit, get feet wet, comes way down. And it was way up here in the target area. And then you talk to the ship and it goes up here that much higher.

Higher than the target area.

Right? Because at the ship, everything is right here. Whereas in the target area, it's fortunes of war.

It's good tactics, but to certain extent, it's out of your hands. So you do your best, but if you're going to smack the ramp or do something bad like that, it's right there, there in your hands. And that was a 4S. So, yeah, you will burn more calories than your tired guy.

And then you stand around the writing room and smoke cigarettes.

When did you quit smoking? Right after that, I quit smoking.

And how was your transition into the civilian life?

Difficult? Because you are used to a guy who says that he does that. In civilian world, it's not that way. Guy says, can you loan me 50 bucks till next Wednesday? In the Navy, he comes looking for you. In civilian world, you got to go looking for him.

Hey, Eddie, give me my 50 bucks. I'll give you half of it. It's all I have. I say, okay.

He's a little bit rocky. And I went in business for myself because my wife thought that might be a good idea for us and the antique Persian rug business, of all things. So I wound up making friends with a lot of Persian guys. Guys, most of them Jews. A couple of them, I still know to this day, call them up saying, how the heck are you? A couple of Muslim guys, all nice people.

You had to be, because you were sort of all in that. Like being in the Navy, they were all in this mess together. So you.

I figured in that Business. I had it because you have retail customers talk to you and say, I've been looking for a lesson. So type. Do you know what that is? Oh, yes. I need it 18ft, but no longer than 19, and I need it thus and so wide. I don't want any wear, but I want more. This color and so forth. Can you do that? As soon as I leave, you get on the phone, call Mohammed and you call Hakim. And can you call that guy, I have what you want. And he will give it to you on your signature if your credit is good. I figured. I called a guy one time and he said, I don't have it, but I know who does have it. He's an old Armenian guy and he's really crotchety and he shouldn't be in business anymore, but he's got some nice choice stuff. This is in New York. 28th Street, 31st street, in that neighborhood, Fifth Avenue. And.

I said, I need this and that and this and that and this and that. Yes, yes. I said, my credit. I said, you don't know me, but I call so and so and call him. And you could call him. I don't have to do that, really. Why? I know who you are. I could have it on. On it. My signature. I drove away one time with 80,000 in wholesale.

Value in the back of my truck. And I figured that was a mistake. No signature. They know who I am. But nice people, a lot of nice people. Not like what you read in the paper.

Did you miss the Navy?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot of pals and stuff like that. But you have to get away from that. You can't live in the past, you know. You gotta keep going. So we had a lot of. I keep saying this, but I had a lot of fun doing that too. And down to my wife. I bought a piece for several thousand and it came back maybe two days later. And I said, where's the less? And so she said, I sold it.

I said, I hope you got more than $5,600 for it. She said, I got 75.

Is that what one of those rugs cost? How much one of those rugs cost?

It depends on what it is. It depends on its age. It depends on its condition. You have to deal with somebody that you know is utterly trustworthy. Because Henry Kissinger got fleeced on a trip to Tehran and he knew it. After it was all over, what happened to him, I don't know exactly what the thing was, but he admitted to the fact that all he did was take that load of stuff that I bought and send it to a dealer somewhere to get rid of it because.

It was junk and he paid a bunch of money for it.

It was very, very embarrassing. Yeah.

And then you ended up with. In the bakery business, right? Bread making business. Is that where you're at now? Yeah.

Well, this is Jocko saying, when you're in the middle of the woods, start walking. And the guy says, which direction? And Jocko says, doesn't matter.

Yeah, start walking.

But I knew how to do that. So Pamela said, why don't you make some bread? And Pamela's brother is in, believe it or not, in the exotic mushroom business. And they have an outdoor farmer's market. These are common in Pennsylvania on Sunday afternoons. And give them to Joe and see if he can sell them. He sold them all. I'm doing it by hand.

So same thing again next week and so forth. And he comes back and says, fred says, you ought to take a table here. Your stuff is good enough. I said, holy smoke. But I can only do so much by hand. So I had a guy that I did business, rug business with, antique. If you find anything like that, Tom, call me how you do and so forth. So I was coming. I used to buy all the time, whatever you could. So I used to go to a lot of outdoor country auctions, more country than anything else. And they had rugs from the 30s. And I drive to Altoona, as I did in this case with my truck, Chevy van, no windows. And I buy the rugs for $1,500 because there's certain human psychology, certain price levels in which a retail customer, knowing that you could pay more, but I won't do that because I don't want surprises and stuff like that. So you know you're going to get them for $1,500 if you drive. All because you talk to the auctioneer and he tells you more or less what it is and he thinks he knows and stuff like. So you drive to Altoona, you look at it and say, yeah, I can get 6,000 for this. I won't pay more than. Have to pay more than $1,500. And you do that. So I came back from Altoona that day to this guy's place and he's in second hand equipment business, secondhand commercial equipment, ovens and mixers and things like that, they go on forever. And he said, you bake bread once in a while. And I didn't buy anything that day. And I had money in my pocket, cash in my pocket. He said, I got A couple of nice ovens over here. I said, not interested. He said, look at them. They're diner sized. They're not the full size. You got to find exactly the right guy. Probably a diner, but he already has. I'll sell him to you for $900.

No, I don't want him. He said, I can slide them right onto your truck. And he didn't know I had money in my pocket either.

Yeah, he did.

Maybe. So he. And finally I said, okay. So then I had to install them myself on a. We live in an old Pennsylvania Dutch, I call them a Pennsylvania German, soft brick, drafty. And they have matching porches on both sides. And this porch was enclosed. So I put them on that porch and had heavy, you know, they weigh, I don't know, thousand apiece, I guess, jacks and everything. Blocks and getting it up and sliding it over. I installed both of them, but I didn't do very much until my sister in law actually said, you need to put bread with Joe at the Skipack Farmers Market on Sunday. So one thing led to another, led to another. And then I went to this nice guy at Kimberton Whole Foods who was at the time, he had one store and he was on the floor himself. And I said, do you think you can sell these? He said, probably not, because LA bus just bailed out of here, but you can put it on their shelves if you want. Came back the next day and there was six of them sold. I said, can I put more? Of course. So one thing led to another. He has about, maybe he has eight stores now and I'm in four.

So you're making bread every day?

No, I work Tuesday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And I deliver on Wednesday what I made on Tuesday night and sliced Wednesday morning to deliver that. Then I work Thursday and deliver that on Friday. And then I'm off Saturday, Sunday, Monday. But I got another racket going.

What's the other racket?

When I ran for Congress, I don't know if you know I did this.

I did know that. Yeah, I was in your notes.

Yeah.

I was supposed to lose. And it was in a gentleman's agreement. You want a guy who can lose gracefully. And I said, that's exactly right. I said, okay. But I thought to myself, this guy, this congressman, he drinks a lot and he may get hit by a truck or have the classic too much alcohol, heart attack or something like that. This is only chance I'll ever get. So I did. I think I put it in there. I did ring 10,000 doorbells. I really did. It gets to be fun after a while. You meet new people and moreover, they ask you questions privately that you hadn't quite thought through. And after you fumble around with that, you say, I won't fumble around with that a second time. And turns out the next two days later, a guy asks you the same question, you're ready for it. So after that, and he spent 10 times what I spent. A U.S. congressman, I was told, will do anything to stay in office. Anything. So at any rate, he spent 10 times what I had to spend. I had $35,000 to spend and he spent 350. But anyway. And he wouldn't debate me either. He finally went to this silly thing on.

He was in D.C. because he couldn't quite return, which is baloney. He was from the county north of where we live. But at any rate.

What was I going to say?

That, well, it had to do with your racket that you're running your other racket.

Yeah, well, I was a stockbroker at that point because when I had my subdural hematoma, they cut a hole in your head. They take a piece out of your head because slept and falling about that. But I call it in there you're John Glenn. John Glenn, fully recovered. And so have I. But a lot of people don't. I think too it's a matter of wanting to and deciding to recover. Because with my case, my right side, it was on my left side. And it's true your left side didn't work right or worked a little bit, but not real well. And I couldn't walk right and stuff like that anyway. So at any rate.

How'D you get the registrar? I am the Pennsylvania registrar for births and Deaths in Oley Township, 06 Township and several surrounding townships. If you die, you need a will. And to have a will, you need an executor who distributes. But you have to prove. Have somebody prove this guy is dead, not just gone to South America and so forth. So you make certified copies of his death certificate issued by generally by the hospital or the coroner. And that way your executor or the man or woman's executor can.

Probate the will and so forth and all that. So at any rate, a year after, maybe 10 months after I lost the election, I get to talk to a guy named Bob Asher, who was a little bit of a character and well known in Pennsylvania politics because he took the heat and went to jail for something he didn't do, but probably to protect a Pennsylvania senator or maybe one of the governors, I don't remember. But he took the heat. And everybody agrees that Bob never did anything. But he owns a candy company called Asher Candies. It's well known chocolates in eastern Pennsylvania. And there he was at this affair. So I went up to him and I said, bob, you owe me one. He said, get out of here. I said, you know who I am? Oh, I know who you are. I said, I rang 10,000 doorbells. Yeah, I heard about that. I said, he had to spend 350,000 to beat me. Yeah, Bob, we both know what that means. He would have spent 35,000 against the guy in Fayette County. He would have spent 58,000 at the guy in Pittsburgh. He would have spent 102,000 in the guy in the Harrisburg race. He spent it all to beat me. Yeah, so what? Bob, you owe me one. A week later, local guy that I knew very well was political office called me up and he said, how'd you like to be register of wills? What in the hell is that?

So I said, yeah, that's right. How much does it pay? Well, you won't make much. You can make 35,000 doing it. You can. But at any rate, they're trying to get rid of the Pennsylvania registrar. Now, I'm just sticking on because I figured right down to the last day. So at any rate, that's how that happened. So I was a stockbroker. And if you start late in life to be a stockbroker, you don't have much of an account. And it's tough. And I got to be a certain age. And I said to my wife, this is not cutting. I got to do something else. And right after that, my sister in law came to me. She's a German national, you wouldn't know it. She has zero accent. She said, you sell bread that's good enough to sell in Germany. You need to do this. I was still doing it by hand, and one thing led to another there. So that's what I do now. And I'll tell you what keeps you in shape. You're not going to get fat doing this unless you want to.

I suppose you got to make sure you don't get too much of your own product, though.

That's true.

Just like the drug.

No, no, no. I say to people, people in store say, oh, I don't eat much bread. I said, it's not the bread, it's what you put on it. Too much mayonnaise or too much strawberry jam is what you do with it. Not the stuff.

Well, what's the name? So where can people get your bread?

You got a shipment of it?

Oh, I got. I know, but I'm not going to be going to the grocery market very often in Pennsylvania.

The Oley Baker.

The Oley Baker.

O L E Y. That's an Indian name for the valley in which we live. The Indian name for it was Olinka, and that got shortened by the locals at that time, way back, Benjamin Franklin did not like to come up to that county. He said, there are too damn many Germans up there. I don't like to go up there. He was a good horseman in his middle age. We all see Ben Franklin as a big fat old guy, fat old man. But he was an expert, expert horseman, and people did not like to travel with him.

I read an account of him going to York, Pennsylvania, which is west of Harrisburg. They didn't like that with him because he would take off overland to basically explore the landscape and whatnot. And they were all afraid he was going to either fall off or get killed by locals, the Indians. So they thought, then we're going to have to go look for him and find him. And some of the folks out there don't like us very much and so forth. So people did not like to go traveling with him. But he was an expert overland horseman. But we all see him as the fat old guy. Yeah, that's the.

That's the image he got stuck with at some point.

Right.

I know you, you know, you wrap up your. Your bio that you sent to Dave and it says 20, 22. Still having fun?

Heck, yeah.

So that's pretty awesome. I don't know. Did we miss anything? Get us up to date.

There's one thing I thought about on going by now, it. Now it escapes me. Same marriage, married to the same woman. This is during the political campaign, they would ask you. I said, still married to the same woman.

Since.

Age 27. So I got married a little bit late.

And it was your daughter that brought you here and linked us up? I think she linked us up on social media. Yeah.

It was an elder daughter, Genevieve, and she wanted to come with me, but she is in a job that she doesn't like and she's intensely searching. So the other daughter said, I'll take him out. And she had not actually said. She said, if you go, I'll buy my own ticket. Okay. So then I said to you, I will not travel alone. I will travel with my wife. Okay. So then Pamela said, I don't want to Go. We have an ancient puppet dog here and she's going to die, so we ought to euthanize her. I can't do that.

That's the pragmatic solution, apparently.

So younger daughter said, I'll go with him. So she is here today in San Diego and elder daughter is angry, but I said, jenny, what you're doing is more important and she's working it. She got into the medical world, most specifically into transplants. And she said, if Jocko says anything to you, ask him if he is a organ donor, because he should be. Everybody should be.

I am.

Yeah, so I'll tell her that. But at any rate, she's going to know.

Apparently, everyone's going to know now.

I said, but the thing about Jenny, the thing that people want is something you can do that most people can't. You can keep six balls in the air at the same time, so to speak. That's why these guys in the transplant business love you so much, because they could say, oh, I don't know about that. Ask Jenny. And she had the answer. Or this computer thing is screwed up and it's off the thing and it won't work. And say, call Jenny. She can do that and she does. So the younger daughter, they have the.

She and her husband have their own business, so it's easily done for them, although they're very serious and they do well. So that's the whole thing there. There's something else.

Dave, what do you got?

Oh, man, I got a lot. I know we're kind of running. I've been taking a lot of notes.

I just.

I'm remarking how many similarities there are and I just started writing things down. I was stationed at Meridian. I was stationed at Kingsville. I was in LSO. I have about 40 traps in the Connie early in my career.

How about that?

Yeah, I. I did the spin rides in the T2 and I knew were a spin instructor. I know that. Well, it's fun.

Is it great? I said, near one of those things. I said, it's great carnival ride, but so many counties would not do it. I used to say the. The student didn't know who I was. I'll be doing your spinhop today. You're terrified. Well, no, Mr. Coppel, but I thought that. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. How many guys have you been punched out on spinhops? Oh, I don't know. No one. It's a carnival ride and so forth. And Fred didn't want to gives me the. I don't like to Do. I'll do them. I'll do them for you. So I would do a lot of spin offs in Meridian. It was a carnival ride. Not much instruction goes on that day, except for the rote. All right, Mr. Smith. We established the direction of rotation and we will positively neutralize the controls and then apply full opposite rudder. And when the rotation stops, we will put stick full forward and so forth. That's all you do. And. Okay, fine. We got that. Now we're gonna climb back up. You have to do it again. Yeah, we're gonna do it again, too.

I remember it well. Some of the best rides ever.

Yeah.

My time with the Air Force. And then you kind of conclude with a couple things that I just couldn't help make the connection to living on the O3 level in the state room, underneath the catapults. And then God forbid, I am on a podcast where I don't have to say something nice about Navy SEALs. But you worked for a frogman and got to see what real good leadership looks like.

But you know what? He. Let's talk about leadership. Just a second. He was not well thought of mostly by the younger guys who are rocking and the fleet squadron I was in. He never does anything and he'd talk and they would say not nice things about him. I don't think any of the front seat guys said that.

What a surprise.

But the back seat guys, they're all young and.

Lieutenant junior grades, all of them solid and most of them retired as commanders. I don't know what the heck they got them to do to stay in the Navy that long. But at any rate, they didn't like him because they couldn't understand what he was doing. I think the front seat guys all really understood what was going on there.

Well, I think there's a real strong connection between pilots and seals. I got to learn that firsthand working with Jocko. But he did it at a time. You did it at a time where you didn't have the machines that we had. I mean, you flew an airplane that I guarantee you was infinitely harder than it was for me. But it occurred to me that the. The legacy that I got to live under, the 35 years of history was written about people like you. And when I got them, when I got in the Navy, in the Marine Corps, how we flew fighters and the way we taught people to fly fighters was already embedded. And that all started with your generation.

So.

But, you know, that's what I was thinking about in that Dan Patterson and the book. I wasn't Quite called Top Gun until maybe, I don't know, three, four, five years later, somebody said top gun. But the F4 didn't have a gun. And I don't. And all your newspaper guys, they'll say, oh, how do I have a gun? And I finally did the F4E and had a gun. And finally. No, the missile was a better weapon every time. Every time. You had to be within 3,000ft to do anything with a 20 millimeter gun. I shot the gun at Kingsville. We all did. I was bad at it, too. I don't know.

They put your color paint on your.

And then they examined the banner. No greens on here. What happened to you, Tom?

Embarrassing. You know, I'm an older guy. I'm supposed to have holes in there. But at any rate.

I utterly disagree with that business about any sort of a fighter plane. You have to have a gun. Baloney. Now, early on, Sparrows didn't work because white hat sailors would drop them and chuck them up into the bottom of the airplane. And they didn't test them to make sure this is working and things like that. And the aviators didn't turn the panel on to see if the missiles. They called it tuning that the missiles would tune and things like that. And then if one didn't tune, you flip past that to go to the number two and so forth and fire that one. Forget about the first. But then you could do one more thing that came out during Top Gun that nobody during Advanced Fighter Weapons School. If you went to Boresight, tell the guy in back cockpit, go to Boresight. The antenna goes where the. The Pipper is through the 35 mil gun sight is looking. They're both looking at the same place. And that's what I was going to do with the 21, go Boreside, pull the trigger. And you'd get a Sparrow, which is a monster missile, weighs 500 pounds. Sparrow. The ones we had anyway, the e models weighed 500 pounds. But anyway, it wasn't called fighter weapons school back then. Oh, yeah. So the thing you read in Dan Pedersen's book, who remains a nice guy.

But I would say this to him in a collegial way. Most of the airplanes shot down In World War I, in World War II, in Korean War, in the Vietnam War, never saw the guy that shot them down. They never saw the missile that shot them down. I know. I knew guys who came out feet wet out of North Vietnam and saw the missile go by. The B model missile, the missile the Russians had, they stole it from us and shipped it through Berlin on commercial freight. And it didn't guide that well. At least the Russian version of it didn't. It had a big seeker head on it and. And it didn't narrow its sight. But I talked with guys who said I saw the missile go by and I had no idea.

Holy smoke. Most guys who got shot down and I heard this early in the cruise, not until I was out there. And you get fully realized that they use real bullets here and stuff. Most 95% of the airplanes that get shot down get shot down. And they never saw.

Whatever did it to them. They never saw it. One time we were in Laos somewhere, it doesn't matter where. Waiting for the fact. And he's at 14 now I'm at 15. He's in a port orbit and I'm in starboard orbit orbit. We're just waiting quietly. And Here comes an F4. You can tell because it has at the wing roots and the leading edge have two flashing white lights. That's an F4. And he comes flying by and he gets about where we are. That's where there are guns on the ground because that's where there are trucks parked and that's where the FAK is going to meet us. And those gunners can hear us up overhead. But here comes this guy over the horizon. An F4.

At this guy, probably 57 at least, maybe 85 millimeter. And he's still got his lights on bright and flash. And he disappeared over the horizon. Bright and flash. Did you go get close to him? Well, not that close because they were shooting at him. But I went close and they could see that is an Air Force F4. It's not some Navy guy who's lost or something. It's Air Force F4. And he never knew it. Oblivious to everything with his lights on bright and flash. True story. So my point here is that Top Gun is, or what they call now Top Gun is very interesting. If you go one on one. You both start from here. You turn and start with a head on pass and so forth. One guy is better than the other and he gets behind the other. But that's not what happens. What happens is the guy that you were picking your nose for some reason or other and the mig 21 showed up or a mig 26 or God knows what it is. And he shot you down from three miles astern because you were picking your nose. You've got to be a wild man in that cockpit if you don't want to get. You got to know everything that's going on 360 degrees all the time. So you turn into a crazy man and you fly with a new ro. He said you're really nuts. Yeah, I'm still here, too.

That's all I got, man.

So at any rate, I beg your pardon. I interrupted you.

Not at all. That's great.

That's probably a great place to wrap it up right there.

All right.

That's a great attitude to have. Thank you so much for coming out here.

It was fun.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, lessons learned, and, of course, most important, thank you for your service.

Oh, baloney.

Thank you for your service in the Air Force and your service in the Navy, and most of all, thank you for your service to our great nation.

Amen.

Thank you, sir.

And with that, Tom Kopel has left the building.

Pretty awesome to hear from a dude that, as you were telling me, and before we hit record, Dave, in the middle of the Vietnam War, just volunteers to go and fly, you know, F4 Phantoms. That's the pipeline, too. So pretty amazing to hear these guys. I thought it was actually pretty interesting about the nuclear war stuff, too.

Yeah.

You know, like, what.

What.

What are you thinking?

What? You.

You know, I was in the SEAL teams, and I was like, hey, we might do a mission in the 90s. Like, hey, we might do a mission, Michael. You know, kill a terrorist. This dude's like, hey, we might go and end humanity. Yeah, you know, that's a. I remember.

When I first started flying airplanes, what you really want to do is you actually want to. You want to do something. You want to drop a bomb. You want to get in a fight. That's what you want to do. And there's a double edge to that because, you know, like, well, I mean, we don't want to go to war. It's not a good thing. But if you do, you, like, you want to get the call, the only thing you're ever going to do when you're, you know, Strategic Air Command with nuclear weapons and a B52, you get that call. Like, that's a different psychology about what your job is, you know? And I could see someone like him getting pretty restless doing strip alert all day, knowing it's kind of unlikely. And even if it did work out, like, what are you actually doing there?

That's.

That's not a scenario you want to be in no matter what.

So, yeah, crazy.

But anyways, thanks for listening. If you want to support the podcast, you want to support yourself, get yourself some jockofuel jockey. Fuel.com. you can get these These drinks we're drinking right here. Get yourself some after Burner orange, the tasty flavor Milk going ham on the milk. We got. We got ready to drink milk now. People are kind of going crazy with that stuff. I'll tell you what's what. What's what I find.

Look, just like every other freaking American, the convenience of just cracking one of those open and drinking it. Look, how much effort is it for me to get out my. Get out my milk, get out my shaker, put my milk in there, shake it. You know, that has to take me at least.

Three minutes or I got that little ready to drink hitter just ready to, you know, take some. The other thing I find about it is you can just do.

You can.

It's so effortless that you can just open one up. Like I have. I have a part of my fridge where I have one of each kind of opened, where I'll just go like, take a sip. Take maybe two or three sips. You know, just during the day, just a flyby.

So there you go. Molk all the joint stuff. You know what? You know what it is? You can get it jogger fuel.com youm can get it the Wawa. Get the drinks at Wawa. Get a vitamin shop. Go get some support. Origin usa. I saw Cam Haynes today posted Cam teaching Tulsi Gabbard how to shoot a bow. And they're wearing Origin Hunt. Man. How legit is that? Pretty awesome. So check out OriginUSA.com. we're making stuff in America. Jeans.

Jiu Jitsu, geese boots, T shirts, rash guards. All 100% made in America.

So get some of that. We got a store echo called it Jocastore. It's Jocko store dot com. Get T shirts. What are you wearing? Oh, that's a legit one. So, Dave, right now, if you're not on YouTube, Dave's wearing the Sea Wolves T shirts. 1966 to 1972. The only aviation unit ever commissioned and decommissioned in a combat zone. We've had some Sea Wolves on the podcast. There's a T shirt to represent the Sea Wolves. You can get that@jocko store.com. we also got Rash guards and hats and beanies and all that kind of stuff. Get the shirt locker.

Shirt lockers. It's a little opportunity for us to express kind of, let's say, some deep layers to the podcast. And it's a subscription thing. Get a shirt a month, then they're cool. We got this podcast. Subscribe to it. Jocko Underground. We're doing the underground podcast which is also a platform that we have that we control. Because if you're not in control of a platform, you should be nervous that they could kick you off that platform. So I was nervous about that. Now, look, I'm not trying to get kicked off. I don't think I'm gonna get kicked off. We're not getting crazy over here, but there's certain things I've said that have been demonetized.

So who knows when they're gonna say, yeah, you can't say that anymore. So we have our own platform. Jockoendoground.com check that out. YouTube channel.

Jocko podcast is the YouTube channel. Origin USA also has a YouTube channel. Got psychological Warfare. We got Flipside Canvas. Dakota Meyer. Got a bunch of books. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. Final spin, the audiobook of Final Spin. Dave and I did like a Q and A from Final Spin at the. So after the book, you can do the Q and A. You can listen to that Q and A. Pretty cool. The background of where it came from. I can tell you where it's going. That thing's making moves. I'll leave it at that for now because it's hard to get these things done. But anyways. Written a bunch of books, Warrior Kid books. Just I have a gym, Victory MMA and Fitness. And just about every day a parent will come up to me and say thank you for those books that got my kid to focus in school, got my kid here to start training Jiu Jitsu, got my kid to stop eating junk.

So check out those books for your kids. Way of the Warrior Kid series.

Mikey and the Dragons. Hackworth About Face, Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy of leadership. All these books, you know, I've written them, get them if you want them. Echelon Front. What's Echelon Front?

Dave Burke, Echelon Front is our leadership consultancy where we, you, me, Leif and the whole team get to actually, in person, live, talk about every single leadership principle you've been talking about on this podcast. And in the book, we get to do it with companies and people all the time.

It's.

It's awesome.

And what about the Academy?

Oh, the Academy. The Extreme Ownership Academy. It turns out that meeting people live and in person isn't always the most convenient way to do it. And bringing people off the line and bringing people into a conference room or a classroom every single day is not a great way to train. We want to keep people working, but the Academy takes basically everything we teach. Puts it online so you can get to it. Whenever and however you want to. And it's an awesome additional resource. It's basically be able to hit that leadership gym every day, whenever it's convenient for you. So we got the academy.

Yeah. Just like Jiu Jitsu, there's moves you gotta learn. There's moves you've gotta learn about leadership. And just like Jiu Jitsu, you can't just look at a move and hear it one time and be like, oh, cool, I'll throw this uma plata on somebody now. This is not gonna work. You gotta. You gotta fully understand it. You gotta see it from different angles. You gotta try it yourself. And that's what the Academy is. ExtremeOwnership.com if you want to get in on that. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help gold star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization, does incredible stuff, does incredible stuff, takes service members. This is one of the, one of the things that she does. She takes service members who have significant health issues and she gets some treatment. It's a multifaceted treatment. One of the big treatments is hyperbaric chamber. So you're going in riding the O2. She sets this up for like 30 or 45 days, all expenses paid.

So.

And we've seen the results of this is just outstanding. So if you want to donate or you want to support that, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org and also don't forget about Micah Fink, who's taken vets up into the wilderness to heal through adversity, which is pretty awesome. Heroesandhorses.org and if you want to follow us on Twitter, on Graham on the Facebook, Dave is at davidr Burke. Jocko Willink. Watch out for the algorithm. Thanks once again to Tom Kopel for making the trip out for sharing those experiences and lessons learned from your life. Pretty neat to hear this stuff. First person.

Thanks for your service. Thanks for coming out and thanks to all our military personnel with a special recognition today to those of you that help us own the skies, the pilots, the navigators, the air crews, the maintenance and mechanics on the ground, and the thousands of support people that make our domination of the air possible. Thank you for what you all do. And thanks as well to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. Thanks for what you do here on the home front to keep us safe. And I want to close this out with another quote, A quote from Captain David McCampbell, United States Navy, 34 air victories in World War II, the most of any US Navy pilot ever.

And he said this, quote, aggressiveness was a fundamental to success in air to air combat. And if you ever caught a fighter pilot in a defensive mood, you had him licked before you started shooting. End quote. So there you go. That just doesn't apply to air to air combat. It applies to everything. That's how you win. So get out there, be aggressive. Make things happen. And, of course, keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Dave and Jocko out.